The technical advancement of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key function in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
ขนาดpressuregauge is well-known in numerous 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’ ability to pump extremely viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The power efficiency of pipeline transportation additionally helps minimize energy prices and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing attention to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This also allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic materials at high temperatures, such as nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, offering some of the price efficient and sustainable switch methods out there to the mining industry. These pumps have also performed an integral role in 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 move tailings from the plant, attaining the necessary seaside slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is an important methodology for mining to achieve 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 materials – measuring 70% solids by weight – again into the mine’s worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an efficient and reliable means of dewatering from nice depths, as a substitute of using a quantity of smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the floor in just one lift – 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 perform,” he says. “It additionally reduces the fee and upkeep necessities of getting multiple pumping stations at completely different levels throughout the mine.”
The status of GEHO® pumps has also been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and growth into its pumps’ wear parts. This process is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system in which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps interact with these techniques, we focus on key elements of the pumps such as the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid provides the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm ensuring that each one the shifting parts move in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to management the amount of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is completed via the PLC control, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the proper position.
“Rubber is good at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our aim is to increase the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to minimize back both their downtime and their total cost of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed via digital know-how in order that operators can keep abreast – in actual 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 vary, and is even exploring potentialities for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a more cost effective option to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ global service network, making certain that wherever our pumps are working there might be an experienced native service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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