The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary 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’ ability to pump highly viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The energy effectivity of pipeline transportation also helps reduce vitality prices and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The foundation of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing attention to technical innovation and improvement,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers within 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 capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, offering some of the value efficient and sustainable transfer strategies out there to the mining trade. These pumps have additionally played an integral function within 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 mandatory seaside slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a vital methodology for mining to attain safety and environmental objectives, 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 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 powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the floor in only one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee effectiveness of this answer, an important benefit is that it reduces the chance of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the entire dewatering function,” he says. “It also reduces the cost and maintenance necessities of getting a quantity of pumping stations at completely different levels within the mine.”
The popularity of GEHO® pumps has additionally been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and improvement into its pumps’ wear components. This process is based on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system during which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps work together with these methods, we concentrate on key features of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid provides the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm guaranteeing that every one the shifting parts transfer in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to management the volume of propelling liquid within the chamber. เกจวัดแรงดันแก๊ส is completed via the PLC management, to make sure that the diaphragm runs in the right position.
เกจวัดแรงดันsumo is sweet at bending, but if it stretches it might possibly tear,” he says. “Our aim is to extend the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to scale back both their downtime and their complete cost of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted via digital know-how so that operators can stay abreast – in real time – of the pump’s performance 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 possibilities for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a more economical choice to traditional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ international service community, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are working there might be an skilled local service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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