The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® positive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well-known in various pumping applications including tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® positive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capacity to pump highly viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The vitality effectivity of pipeline transportation also helps minimize vitality costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The foundation of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing attention to technical innovation and improvement,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic materials at excessive temperatures, similar to nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their high capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over tons of of kilometres, offering some of the value efficient and sustainable transfer methods out there to the mining industry. These pumps have additionally performed an integral role within the success of a Weir Minerals paste answer at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine makes use of GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, achieving the required seashore slope on its tailings facility to fulfill its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is a crucial technique for mining to attain 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 – 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 nice depths, instead of utilizing multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the surface in only one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee effectiveness of this answer, an necessary advantage is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the entire dewatering perform,” he says. “It also reduces the cost and upkeep requirements of having a quantity of pumping stations at completely different ranges throughout the mine.”
The status of GEHO® pumps has also been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and growth into its pumps’ wear elements. This course of is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps interact with these methods, we give consideration to key features of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid offers the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm ensuring that each one the shifting parts move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the need to management the amount of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is finished by way of the PLC control, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the right place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but if it stretches it could possibly tear,” he says. “Our purpose is to increase the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce both their downtime and their total value of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed via digital expertise so that operators can keep abreast – in real time – of the pump’s performance and situation. pressure gauge trerice ราคา 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 vary, and is even exploring prospects for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a less expensive choice to traditional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ international service network, making certain that wherever our pumps are operating there will be an experienced local service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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