The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well known in various pumping functions including tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® constructive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capacity to pump highly viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The power efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps minimize vitality prices and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing attention to technical innovation and improvement,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic material at excessive temperatures, similar to nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over tons of of kilometres, providing one of the most cost effective and sustainable switch methods available to the mining business. These pumps have also played an integral position within the success of a Weir Minerals paste solution at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, achieving the mandatory seaside slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is an important method for mining to realize safety and environmental objectives, 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 – back into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an efficient and reliable way of dewatering from great depths, as a substitute of utilizing a quantity of smaller pumps to switch water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the surface in just one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the cost effectiveness of this solution, an important advantage is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the complete dewatering operate,” he says. “It additionally reduces the fee and maintenance requirements of having multiple pumping stations at totally different levels inside the mine.”
The status of GEHO® pumps has additionally been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and development into its pumps’ wear components. This course of is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system in which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps interact with these systems, we focus on key aspects of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid supplies the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm making certain that all the shifting parts move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to control the quantity of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is completed through the PLC control, to guarantee that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but if it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to scale back both their downtime and their complete price of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted via digital know-how in order that operators can keep abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s efficiency and condition. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to clients, 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 cost effective option to conventional hoisting strategies.
pressure gauge 10 bar to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ global service network, making certain that wherever our pumps are operating there shall be an experienced local service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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