Carbon-in-pulp (CIP) operations are used extensively in the gold mining sector to recover aurocyanide form solution. In this study, an attempt was made to model these operations by making use of various simplifying assumptions in order to simulate the effect of changing operating conditions on plant performance. A pragmatic approach was followed as the developed simulation is aimed at industrial scale applications. The model is based on the assumptions that leaching and adsorption rates are a function of the difference in concentration between metallic gold and aurocyanide, and aurocyanide and gold adsorbed onto the activated carbon respectively. This type of model proved to be effective for plant data simulation purposes and could be solved using a Newtonian search algorithm where the errors between predicted outputs and plant data is minimized. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.