The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well-known in various pumping functions together with 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 extremely viscous slurry, permitting mines to preserve water. The vitality efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps reduce vitality 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 within 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 excessive capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, providing some of the cost effective and sustainable transfer methods obtainable to the mining trade. เพรสเชอร์เกจ have also played an integral position in 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 maneuver tailings from the plant, attaining the required seaside slope on its tailings facility to fulfill its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a crucial methodology 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 material – 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 means of dewatering from nice depths, as an alternative of using a quantity of smaller pumps to switch water to floor. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in just one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the cost effectiveness of this solution, an important benefit is that it reduces the risk of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the complete dewatering operate,” he says. “It additionally reduces the price and upkeep requirements of getting multiple pumping stations at completely different levels within the mine.”
The status of GEHO® pumps has also been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and development into its pumps’ wear parts. This process relies on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking into consideration how our pumps work together with these methods, we focus on key aspects of the pumps such as the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid offers the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm ensuring that every one the moving parts transfer in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the need to management the volume of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is finished through the PLC management, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the best place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but if it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to cut back each their downtime and their complete value of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted via digital expertise in order that operators can stay abreast – in real time – of the pump’s performance and condition. 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 prospects for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a more economical choice to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ world service community, ensuring that wherever our pumps are working there will be an experienced native service crew to assist them,” he concludes.
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