The technical advancement of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well-known in varied pumping functions together with 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 preserve water. The energy efficiency of pipeline transportation additionally helps cut energy costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and improvement,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic materials at excessive temperatures, similar to nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their high capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, offering some of the value effective and sustainable switch methods obtainable to the mining industry. These pumps have also played an integral function 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 maneuver tailings from the plant, achieving the required beach slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is an important method for mining to attain security and environmental targets, and GEHO® pumps have been enabling this work. In a North American platinum operation, the tools pumps over a thousand litres a minute of this viscous backfill material – measuring 70% solids by weight – back into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an environment friendly and reliable way of dewatering from great depths, as a substitute of using multiple smaller pumps to switch water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do that by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the floor in only one carry – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the price effectiveness of this answer, an essential benefit is that it reduces the chance of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering perform,” he says. “It additionally reduces the price and maintenance necessities of having a number of pumping stations at completely different levels within the mine.”
The status of GEHO® pumps has also been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and growth into its pumps’ wear components. 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 work together with these systems, 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 ensuring that every one the transferring parts transfer in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the want to control the volume of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is completed by way of the PLC management, to guarantee that the diaphragm runs in the proper position.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but if it stretches it could possibly tear,” he says. “Our aim is to extend the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to scale back both their downtime and their complete value of possession.”
pressure gauge หลักการ ทํา งาน monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed by way of digital expertise so that operators can stay abreast – in real time – of the pump’s efficiency and condition. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to prospects, 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 floor from deep in a mine – as a more economical choice to traditional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ global service network, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are operating there might be an experienced local service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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