The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key function in decreasing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well known in numerous pumping purposes together with tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® optimistic displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capacity to pump highly viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The power efficiency of pipeline transportation additionally helps cut power prices 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 in the pumping of very acidic materials at high temperatures, similar to nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, offering some of the value efficient and sustainable switch methods obtainable to the mining industry. These pumps have additionally played an integral position 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, reaching the necessary seaside slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is an important method for mining to achieve security and environmental goals, 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 worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an efficient and dependable way of dewatering from great depths, as an alternative of utilizing multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to floor. เกจวัดแรงดันอาร์กอน GEHO® pump range can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the surface in only one carry – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the price effectiveness of this answer, an essential advantage is that it reduces the risk of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the complete dewatering operate,” he says. “It also reduces the price and upkeep necessities of having multiple pumping stations at completely different levels within the mine.”
The reputation of GEHO® pumps has also been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and growth into its pumps’ wear components. This process is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system in which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps interact with these techniques, we focus 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 making certain that each one the transferring components move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to control the amount of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is completed via the PLC control, to make sure that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is good at bending, but if it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our purpose is to extend the replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to reduce each their downtime and their complete cost of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted via digital expertise 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 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 surface from deep in a mine – as a less expensive option to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ world service network, ensuring that wherever our pumps are working there shall be an skilled local service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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