The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key function in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well known in varied pumping purposes together with tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® optimistic displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capability to pump extremely viscous slurry, permitting mines to preserve water. The energy effectivity of pipeline transportation additionally helps minimize power prices and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The foundation of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing attention to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This also allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic materials at excessive temperatures, similar to nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their high capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, offering one of the cost efficient and sustainable transfer methods obtainable to the mining business. These pumps have also performed an integral function within the success of a Weir Minerals paste answer at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine makes use of GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, reaching the required seashore slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is a vital methodology for mining to realize security and environmental targets, and GEHO® pumps have been enabling this work. In a North American platinum operation, the equipment pumps over a thousand litres a minute of this viscous backfill materials – measuring 70% solids by weight – again into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an efficient and dependable method of dewatering from great depths, instead of using a quantity of smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The highly effective GEHO® pump range can do that by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the surface in only one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the price effectiveness of this resolution, an important benefit is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the complete dewatering perform,” he says. “ เกจวัดแรงลม reduces the fee and upkeep requirements of having a number of pumping stations at different ranges throughout the mine.”
The popularity of GEHO® pumps has also been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and development into its pumps’ put on parts. This course of is based on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps work together with these techniques, we focus on key elements 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 making certain that each one the transferring elements move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the want to control the quantity of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is finished through the PLC management, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is good at bending, but if it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our goal is to extend the replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to scale back each their downtime and their total value of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed by way of digital know-how in order that operators can keep abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s efficiency and situation. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to prospects, 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 floor from deep in a mine – as a more cost effective choice to conventional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ global service network, ensuring that wherever our pumps are operating there shall be an experienced native service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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