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The mineral industry faces several challenges in designing sustainable mineral operations with lower environmental and social impacts while remaining profitable. These challenges must be addressed in the design, operation and post-closure phases, but the design phase affords the greatest opportunity to reduce the impact of operations and increase profits. One of the most important challenges is the efficient use of water, especially in arid and semiarid regions.

Approximately 40-60% of the water loss in copper concentration plants is attributed to the water retained in tailings slurries. This work presents a method of designing dewatering systems using hydrocyclones and thickeners as dewatering equipment. Mathematical models were generated to determine the maximum water recovery and the system structure for known equipment sizes and to determine the minimum cost of the equipment and the system structure for a known water recovery. Several case studies were considered and compared with an experimental study of dewatering in a copper concentrator.