The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well-known in various pumping applications including tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® constructive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capacity to pump extremely viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The power effectivity of pipeline transportation additionally helps cut vitality 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 within the pumping of very acidic materials at excessive temperatures, such as nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, providing one of the value efficient and sustainable transfer strategies out there to the mining trade. These pumps have also played an integral role in the success of a Weir Minerals paste resolution at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, attaining the necessary seashore slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is an important methodology for mining to achieve security and environmental targets, 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 material – measuring 70% solids by weight – again into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an efficient and reliable means of dewatering from great depths, as an alternative of utilizing a number of smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump range can do that by pumping from the underside of a mine to the surface in just one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee 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 operate,” he says. “It additionally reduces the cost and upkeep requirements of having a quantity of pumping stations at completely different levels inside the mine.”
The reputation of GEHO® pumps has additionally been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and improvement into its pumps’ wear elements. This course of is based on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system in which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps interact with these systems, we concentrate on key aspects 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 guaranteeing that all the moving elements move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to management the amount of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is finished by way of the PLC control, to guarantee that the diaphragm runs in the best place.
“Rubber is nice at bending, but if it stretches it might possibly tear,” he says. “Our aim is to extend the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to reduce each their downtime and their total price of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted through digital expertise in order 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 potentialities for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a more cost effective choice to traditional hoisting methods.
Snap to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ world service community, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are working there might be an experienced local service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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