The technical advancement of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well-known in various pumping applications 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 highly viscous slurry, allowing mines to conserve water. The vitality efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps cut power 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 within the pumping of very acidic materials at excessive temperatures, corresponding to nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their high capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, offering one of the price efficient and sustainable transfer strategies obtainable to the mining trade. These pumps have additionally played an integral function in 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, reaching the necessary seaside slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a crucial methodology for mining to achieve safety 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 labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an environment friendly and dependable method of dewatering from great depths, instead of utilizing multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump range can do that by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the floor in just one carry – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the cost effectiveness of this resolution, an necessary advantage is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering operate,” he says. “It also reduces the price and maintenance requirements of having a number of pumping stations at completely different ranges inside the mine.”
เกจวัดแรงดันsumo of GEHO® pumps has additionally been built 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 into account how our pumps interact with these systems, we focus on key features of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid offers the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm ensuring that all the moving components transfer in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the want to management the amount of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is completed via the PLC control, to guarantee that the diaphragm runs in the proper position.
“Rubber is nice at bending, but if it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to reduce each their downtime and their complete value of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted through digital technology 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 maintenance 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 choice to conventional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ international service community, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are operating there will be an skilled native service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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