The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® positive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key function in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well known in numerous pumping applications together with tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® optimistic displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capability to pump extremely viscous slurry, permitting mines to conserve water. The power effectivity of pipeline transportation also helps cut vitality 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 in the pumping of very acidic materials at high temperatures, corresponding 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 tons of of kilometres, providing one of the cost effective and sustainable switch methods out there to the mining business. These pumps have also performed an integral position in the success of a Weir Minerals paste answer at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to maneuver tailings from the plant, reaching the mandatory seaside slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a vital method for mining to realize security and environmental targets, 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 pressure gauge 10 bar of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an efficient and dependable method of dewatering from nice depths, as an alternative of using multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to floor. The highly effective GEHO® pump range can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in only one lift – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the cost effectiveness of this resolution, an important benefit is that it reduces the danger of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering perform,” he says. “It also reduces the fee and upkeep necessities of having a number of pumping stations at completely different levels inside the mine.”
The popularity of GEHO® pumps has also been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and development into its pumps’ wear elements. This process relies on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system during which the pump operates.
“Taking into account how our pumps interact with these methods, we concentrate on key features 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 all the transferring parts move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to management the volume of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is completed by way of the PLC control, to guarantee that the diaphragm runs in the right place.
“Rubber is good at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our purpose is to extend the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce each their downtime and their whole cost of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is carried out through digital technology in order that operators can stay abreast – in real 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 vary, and is even exploring prospects for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a less expensive choice to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ international service network, ensuring that wherever our pumps are working there shall be an experienced native service crew to support them,” he concludes.
Share