Weir Minerals Africa : Pumping innovation underpins GEHO success

The technical advancement of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump range is well known in varied pumping purposes including tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® constructive displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ ability to pump highly viscous slurry, permitting mines to preserve water. The power effectivity of pipeline transportation additionally helps minimize vitality costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing attention to technical innovation and improvement,” says Vlot. “This additionally allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic material at high temperatures, such as nickel slurry at more than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With ร้านซ่อมเครื่องวัดความดันomron , GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, offering one of the most cost efficient and sustainable transfer methods out there to the mining business. These pumps have additionally performed an integral position within the success of a Weir Minerals paste resolution at Finland’s largest open pit mine. Yara’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to move tailings from the plant, attaining the mandatory seashore slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a crucial method for mining to attain safety and environmental objectives, 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 materials – measuring 70% solids by weight – back into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an efficient and reliable way of dewatering from nice depths, instead of using a quantity of smaller pumps to transfer water to floor. The highly effective GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the surface in just one lift – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the price effectiveness of this answer, an necessary advantage is that it reduces the risk of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the complete dewatering operate,” he says. “It additionally reduces the fee and maintenance requirements of having multiple pumping stations at completely different levels inside the mine.”
The reputation of GEHO® pumps has also been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing research and development into its pumps’ wear components. This course of is based on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking into account how our pumps interact with these techniques, we give consideration to key aspects 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 ensuring that each one the moving components move in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the need to management the amount of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is done by way of the PLC management, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is good at bending, but if it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our goal is to extend the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce each their downtime and their complete price of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed via digital technology in order 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 clients, 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 prospects for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a less expensive 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 operating there might be an experienced native service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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