The technical advancement of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in decreasing 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’ capability to pump extremely viscous slurry, permitting mines to conserve water. The power efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps minimize energy costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This also 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 excessive capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, providing one of the cost efficient and sustainable transfer methods out there to the mining trade. xp2i have also played an integral function 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 maneuver tailings from the plant, attaining the required beach slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a crucial technique for mining to attain safety and environmental objectives, 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 – again into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an efficient and dependable method of dewatering from nice depths, as an alternative of utilizing multiple smaller pumps to switch water to surface. The highly effective GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in only one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee effectiveness of this solution, an essential advantage is that it reduces the risk of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the entire dewatering operate,” he says. “It additionally reduces the fee and maintenance necessities of getting a quantity of pumping stations at totally different levels inside 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 components. This process relies on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps work together with these techniques, we focus on key aspects 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 all the transferring parts transfer in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to management the quantity of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is finished through the PLC control, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
เกจ์ออกซิเจนsumo is sweet at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our aim is to extend the replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to minimize back both their downtime and their complete price of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed via digital expertise in order that operators can stay abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s efficiency and situation. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to prospects, informing the upkeep schedules and enhancing pump availability.
Vlot notes that Weir Minerals continues to innovate with the GEHO® pump vary, and is even exploring possibilities for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a more economical option to traditional hoisting strategies.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ global service community, ensuring that wherever our pumps are operating there might be an skilled local service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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