The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in decreasing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well known in varied pumping functions together with tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® positive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capacity to pump extremely viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The energy efficiency of pipeline transportation additionally helps cut energy costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and improvement,” says Vlot. “This also allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic materials at high temperatures, similar to nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, offering some of the price efficient and sustainable transfer strategies obtainable to the mining industry. These pumps have also performed an integral position within the success of a Weir Minerals paste resolution at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine makes use of GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, attaining the mandatory beach slope on its tailings facility to fulfill its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a crucial method for mining to achieve security and environmental goals, and GEHO® pumps have been enabling this work. In a North American platinum operation, the tools pumps over a thousand litres a minute of this viscous backfill materials – measuring 70% solids by weight – back into the mine’s worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an efficient and reliable way of dewatering from great depths, as an alternative of utilizing a number of smaller pumps to transfer water to floor. The powerful GEHO® pump range can do this by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the floor in just one carry – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the price effectiveness of this solution, an necessary advantage is that it reduces the chance of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering function,” he says. “It also reduces the cost and maintenance necessities of getting a number of pumping stations at different ranges within the mine.”
The reputation of GEHO® pumps has additionally been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and growth into its pumps’ put on elements. This course of relies on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system during which the pump operates.
“Taking into account how our pumps interact with these techniques, we concentrate on key aspects of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid provides the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm making certain that every one the transferring elements transfer in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to control the amount of propelling liquid in the chamber. digital pressure gauge is finished via the PLC control, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the best position.
“Rubber is good at bending, but when it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our purpose is to extend the replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce both their downtime and their complete cost of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed by way of digital technology in order that operators can stay abreast – in real time – of the pump’s efficiency and situation. pressure gauge 10 bar 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 possibilities for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a more value effective choice to conventional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ world service community, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are working there will be an skilled local service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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