The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in decreasing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well-known in numerous pumping functions together with tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® positive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capability to pump extremely viscous slurry, permitting mines to conserve water. The energy effectivity of pipeline transportation additionally helps minimize power costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and improvement,” says Vlot. “This also allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic material at high temperatures, such as nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their high capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, providing some of the cost effective and sustainable transfer methods out there to the mining industry. These pumps have also played an integral position 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 move tailings from the plant, achieving the required seashore slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is a vital methodology for mining to realize safety 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 worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an environment friendly and reliable means of dewatering from great depths, as an alternative of using multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to floor. The powerful GEHO® pump range can do that by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in only one lift – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the cost effectiveness of this resolution, an essential benefit is that it reduces the chance of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the complete dewatering function,” he says. “It also reduces the price and maintenance requirements of getting multiple pumping stations at completely different levels inside the mine.”
The popularity 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 parts. เกจ์วัดแรงดันน้ำมันเครื่อง of relies on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking into account how our pumps interact with these systems, we give attention to key features of the pumps such as the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid supplies the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm ensuring that each one the moving components transfer in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to control the volume of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is finished via the PLC control, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the best place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our aim is to increase the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to reduce each their downtime and their total cost of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted through digital know-how in order 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 possibilities for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a more economical option to traditional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump options is the Weir Minerals’ global service network, making certain that wherever our pumps are working there will be an skilled local service crew to help them,” he concludes.
Share