The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key function in decreasing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well-known in numerous pumping purposes including 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, allowing mines to preserve water. The energy efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps reduce vitality costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic material at excessive temperatures, such as nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With เกจ์อาร์กอนsumo , GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, providing some of the price effective and sustainable transfer methods available to the mining business. These pumps have additionally performed an integral position in the success of a Weir Minerals paste resolution 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 seashore slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is an important technique for mining to attain security and environmental objectives, 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 – 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 utilizing a number of smaller pumps to switch water to floor. The powerful 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 solution, an important advantage is that it reduces the chance of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering function,” he says. “It additionally reduces the cost and maintenance necessities of getting multiple pumping stations at totally different ranges throughout the mine.”
The popularity of GEHO® pumps has additionally been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and growth into its pumps’ put on elements. This course of relies on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking into consideration how our pumps work together with these systems, 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 guaranteeing that every one the transferring components move in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to control the volume of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is done through the PLC management, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but when it stretches it might possibly tear,” he says. “Our aim is to extend the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to scale back each their downtime and their whole value of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is carried out via digital expertise in order that operators can stay abreast – in real time – of the pump’s performance 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 prospects for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a more value effective option to traditional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ world service network, making certain that wherever our pumps are operating there shall be an skilled native service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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