The technical advancement of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well known in numerous pumping purposes including 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 conserve water. The energy efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps minimize 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 additionally allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic material at excessive temperatures, corresponding to nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, providing one of the value efficient and sustainable transfer methods available to the mining industry. These pumps have also performed an integral function within the success of a Weir Minerals paste solution 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 beach slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a vital technique for mining to achieve safety and environmental goals, 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 worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an efficient and dependable method of dewatering from great depths, instead of utilizing a number of smaller pumps to switch water to surface. The highly effective GEHO® pump range can do that by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in only one carry – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee effectiveness of this answer, an necessary advantage is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the entire dewatering perform,” he says. “It also reduces the cost and maintenance requirements of getting multiple pumping stations at different ranges 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 improvement into its pumps’ wear elements. This process is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking into account how our pumps work together with these methods, we give consideration to 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 every one the moving components transfer in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the want to management the quantity of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is completed through the PLC management, to guarantee that the diaphragm runs in the right position.
“Rubber is nice at bending, but if it stretches it could tear,” he says. “ เกจวัดแรงดันน้ำมันเบนซิน is to extend the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to scale back both their downtime and their complete cost of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed by way of digital expertise so that operators can stay abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s performance and condition. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to customers, informing the maintenance schedules and enhancing pump availability.
Vlot notes that Weir Minerals continues to innovate with the GEHO® pump range, and is even exploring prospects for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a less expensive choice to traditional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ global service community, making certain that wherever our pumps are operating there might be an skilled local service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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