The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in decreasing 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® positive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capability to pump extremely viscous slurry, permitting mines to conserve water. The energy efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps cut 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 materials at high temperatures, similar to nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, offering one of the most cost efficient and sustainable transfer strategies available to the mining trade. 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, reaching the necessary beach slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a vital method for mining to attain security and environmental goals, and GEHO® pumps have been enabling this work. In a North American platinum operation, the gear 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 reliable method of dewatering from great depths, as a substitute of using a quantity of smaller pumps to switch water to surface. The highly effective GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the surface in only one lift – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee effectiveness of this answer, an essential advantage is that it reduces the danger of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the complete dewatering operate,” he says. “ differential pressure gauge ราคา reduces the price and maintenance requirements of getting multiple pumping stations at different levels throughout the mine.”
The reputation of GEHO® pumps has additionally been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and growth into its pumps’ put on components. This process is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system in which the pump operates.
“Taking into consideration how our pumps work together with these techniques, we focus on key elements of the pumps such as the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid supplies the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm making certain that each one the moving elements transfer in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the need to management the volume of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is finished by way of the PLC control, to make certain that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is good at bending, but when it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce both their downtime and their total cost of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted via digital technology so that operators can keep abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s performance and situation. 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 less expensive option to conventional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ global service community, ensuring that wherever our pumps are operating there will be an skilled local service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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