The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in decreasing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well-known in various pumping applications including tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® optimistic displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ ability to pump extremely viscous slurry, allowing mines to conserve water. The vitality effectivity of pipeline transportation also helps minimize power costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing attention to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic materials at excessive 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 lots of of kilometres, offering one of the cost efficient and sustainable switch methods available to the mining trade. These pumps have also performed an integral role in the success of a Weir Minerals paste answer at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, reaching the required seashore slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a crucial 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 – back into the mine’s worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an efficient and reliable method of dewatering from great depths, as a substitute of using a quantity of smaller pumps to transfer water to floor. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in only one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the price effectiveness of this answer, an important benefit is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering function,” he says. “It additionally reduces the price and maintenance necessities of getting multiple pumping stations at different ranges within the mine.”
The popularity of GEHO® pumps has additionally been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and development into its pumps’ wear components. This process is based on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system during which the pump operates.
เกจ์วัดแรงดันแก๊ส Taking into account how our pumps interact with these methods, we focus on key elements 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 ensuring that each one the shifting parts move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to management the quantity of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is done by way of the PLC control, to make sure that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is good at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our aim is to increase the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to cut back both their downtime and their total value of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is carried out through digital expertise in order that operators can stay abreast – in real time – of the pump’s efficiency and situation. 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 possibilities for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a more economical option to conventional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ world service network, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are operating there will be an experienced native service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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