The technical advancement of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in lowering 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 extremely viscous slurry, allowing mines to conserve water. The vitality efficiency 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 enchancment,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic material at excessive temperatures, such as nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their high capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, offering some of the price effective and sustainable transfer strategies available to the mining trade. These pumps have additionally performed an integral function within the success of a Weir Minerals paste solution at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, attaining the mandatory seashore slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is a crucial method for mining to achieve safety and environmental goals, 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 material – measuring 70% solids by weight – again into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an environment friendly and reliable method of dewatering from great depths, instead of utilizing a quantity of smaller pumps to switch water to surface. The highly effective GEHO® pump range can do that by pumping from the underside of a mine to the surface in just one carry – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the cost effectiveness of this resolution, an essential benefit is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering function,” he says. “It additionally reduces the price and maintenance necessities of getting a quantity of pumping stations at completely 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 analysis and development into its pumps’ wear elements. This process is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system during which the pump operates.
เกจวัดแรงดันสูง Taking into consideration how our pumps interact with these techniques, we concentrate on key aspects of the pumps such as the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid offers the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm ensuring that all the shifting components transfer in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the need to control the volume of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is finished by way of the PLC management, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the best place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but if it stretches it might possibly tear,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce both their downtime and their complete price of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed by way of digital technology so that operators can keep abreast – in actual 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 vary, and is even exploring potentialities for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a less expensive choice to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ global service network, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are working there might be an experienced local service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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