Abstract: In view of problems of poor accuracy and high medium consumption of manual control of shunt in dense-medium separation process , an automatic shunt control system in dense-medium separation process was designed, and opening prediction model of the shunt valve based on the least squares support vector machines was established. The parameters including suspension density, coal slime content, qualified medium tank level and opening degree of water supply valve are collected by sensors, which are used as input variables of opening prediction model of the shunt valve. Output value of opening degree of the shunt valve is calculated by the model and then is sent to PLC, so as to control operation of the shunt valve and realize automatic shunt control. The application results show that the density fluctuation of suspension liquid can be controlled in the range of ±0.005 g/cm3, and the ton coal dense-medium consumption is reduced by 0.216 kg.