The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well-known in varied pumping functions together with tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® optimistic 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 minimize power costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The foundation of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and improvement,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic material at excessive temperatures, similar to nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their high capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, offering some of the price efficient and sustainable transfer strategies out there to the mining trade. These pumps have additionally performed an integral function in the success of a Weir Minerals paste resolution at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to maneuver tailings from the plant, attaining the necessary seaside slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is an important methodology for mining to realize security 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 – back into the mine’s worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an efficient and dependable way of dewatering from great depths, as a substitute of utilizing multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump range can do that by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in just one lift – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee effectiveness of this answer, an important benefit is that it reduces the danger of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the entire dewatering perform,” he says. “It also reduces the price and upkeep necessities of getting a quantity of pumping stations at different ranges throughout the mine.”
The reputation of GEHO® pumps has additionally been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and growth into its pumps’ wear parts. This process is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system in which the pump operates.
“Taking into account how our pumps interact with these systems, we concentrate on key aspects of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. เกจวัดแรงดัน250bar supplies the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm guaranteeing that all the transferring elements move in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the need to management the volume of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is finished via the PLC management, to make sure that the diaphragm runs in the proper position.
“Rubber is good at bending, but if it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to scale back both their downtime and their whole value of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed through digital know-how in order 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 clients, 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 potentialities for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a more price effective choice to conventional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ international service network, ensuring that wherever our pumps are working there might be an skilled native service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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