The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well-known in varied pumping applications including tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® positive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capability to pump extremely viscous slurry, permitting mines to preserve water. The vitality efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps cut vitality prices and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The foundation 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 material at high temperatures, such as nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their high capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, providing some of the price efficient and sustainable transfer strategies out there to the mining business. These pumps have additionally performed an integral role in the success of a Weir Minerals paste resolution at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, achieving the required beach slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a vital method for mining to realize safety and environmental objectives, 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 – again into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an environment friendly and dependable means of dewatering from great depths, instead of using multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the floor in just one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the price effectiveness of this answer, an necessary advantage is that it reduces the danger of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering function,” he says. “It additionally reduces the cost and maintenance necessities of having a quantity of pumping stations at different ranges within the mine.”
The status of GEHO® pumps has also been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and development into its pumps’ put on components. เกจวัดแรงดันลม relies on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system during 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 ensuring that all the moving elements move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to management the volume of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is completed via the PLC management, to guarantee that the diaphragm runs in the right position.
“Rubber is nice at bending, but when it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our aim is to extend the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce each their downtime and their total value of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is carried out by way of digital technology in order that operators can keep abreast – in real time – of the pump’s efficiency and situation. 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 prospects for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a more cost effective option to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ global service community, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are operating there will be an experienced native service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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