The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well known in numerous pumping applications including tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® optimistic displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ ability to pump highly viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The vitality efficiency of pipeline transportation additionally helps reduce vitality prices and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This also allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic material at excessive temperatures, such as nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, providing some of the value efficient and sustainable transfer methods out there to the mining industry. These pumps have additionally performed an integral position within the success of a Weir Minerals paste answer at Finland’s largest open pit mine. เกจวัดแรงดัน ’s Siilinjärvi mine makes use of GEHO® pumps to maneuver tailings from the plant, achieving the required beach slope on its tailings facility to fulfill its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is an important method for mining to realize safety and environmental goals, and GEHO® pumps have been enabling this work. In a North American platinum operation, the gear pumps over a thousand litres a minute of this viscous backfill material – measuring 70% solids by weight – back into the mine’s worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an efficient and dependable method of dewatering from nice depths, instead of using multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The highly effective GEHO® pump vary can do that by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the surface in just one carry – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the cost effectiveness of this solution, an important advantage is that it reduces the danger of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the entire dewatering function,” he says. “ diaphragm seal reduces the price and maintenance necessities of getting multiple pumping stations at different levels inside the mine.”
The reputation of GEHO® pumps has also been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and improvement into its pumps’ wear parts. This process relies on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system during which the pump operates.
“Taking into consideration how our pumps work together with these systems, we focus on key features of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid offers the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm guaranteeing that every one the transferring components transfer in oil and never slurry.
diaphragm seal emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the need to control the volume of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is completed via the PLC control, to make sure that the diaphragm runs in the right position.
“Rubber is good at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce each their downtime and their complete price of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed through digital expertise so that operators can keep abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s performance and situation. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to customers, informing the upkeep schedules and enhancing pump availability.
Vlot notes that Weir Minerals continues to innovate with the GEHO® pump vary, and is even exploring potentialities for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a more price effective option to traditional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ global service community, making certain that wherever our pumps are operating there will be an experienced native service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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