เกรดวัดแรงดัน of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well known in varied pumping applications together with 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 preserve water. The energy efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps reduce vitality prices and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic material at excessive temperatures, such as nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, providing some of the price efficient and sustainable transfer methods available to the mining industry. These pumps have additionally played an integral role in the success of a Weir Minerals paste answer 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 seashore slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is an important method for mining to attain safety and environmental targets, 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 – back into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an environment friendly and dependable way of dewatering from great depths, as a substitute of using a number of smaller pumps to transfer water to floor. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this 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 necessary benefit is that it reduces the chance of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering function,” he says. “It additionally reduces the price and upkeep necessities of getting multiple pumping stations at completely different levels throughout the mine.”
The status of GEHO® pumps has also been built on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and growth into its pumps’ wear parts. This course of is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system during which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps interact with these methods, we focus on key elements 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 guaranteeing that every one the shifting components transfer in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to management the volume of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is finished through the PLC control, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the right place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but when it stretches it might possibly tear,” he says. “Our goal is to extend the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to scale back both their downtime and their total value of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted through digital know-how so that operators can keep abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s efficiency 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 range, and is even exploring potentialities for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a more value effective option to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ global service community, making certain that wherever our pumps are working there will be an skilled native service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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