The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® positive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key position in lowering mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well known in varied pumping purposes together with tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® constructive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capacity to pump highly viscous slurry, allowing mines to conserve water. The energy efficiency of pipeline transportation additionally helps minimize 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 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 lots of of kilometres, providing some of the price efficient and sustainable transfer methods available to the mining industry. These pumps have also performed an integral function within the success of a Weir Minerals paste answer at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to maneuver tailings from the plant, achieving the mandatory seashore slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine strategy.
เพรสเชอร์เกจลม is an important technique for mining to attain safety and environmental goals, 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 – back 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, instead of using multiple smaller pumps to switch water to floor. The highly effective GEHO® pump vary can do that by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in just one raise – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee effectiveness of this answer, an essential advantage is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering perform,” he says. “It additionally reduces the price and upkeep necessities of having a quantity of pumping stations at totally different ranges within the mine.”
เครื่องมือที่ใช้ในการวัดความดัน of GEHO® pumps has additionally been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and development into its pumps’ wear elements. This course of is based on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps interact with these systems, we concentrate on key aspects 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 making certain that every one the transferring elements move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to control the volume of propelling liquid in the chamber. This is done through the PLC control, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the right place.
“Rubber is nice at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our purpose is to increase the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce each their downtime and their whole value of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is carried out through digital expertise so that operators can stay abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s efficiency and condition. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to customers, informing the upkeep 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 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’ international service community, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are working there will be an skilled local service crew to support them,” he concludes.
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