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 decreasing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well known in various pumping functions including tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® optimistic displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ capacity to pump highly viscous slurry, allowing mines to preserve water. The vitality efficiency of pipeline transportation also helps cut power prices and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing consideration to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This also allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic materials at high temperatures, such as nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capacity, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over hundreds of kilometres, providing one of the most price efficient and sustainable transfer methods available to the mining trade. These pumps have also performed an integral position 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, attaining the required seashore slope on its tailings facility to fulfill its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is a crucial technique for mining to achieve security and environmental goals, 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 – again into the mine’s labored out areas.
In เกจวัดแรงดันน้ำมันเบนซิน of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an efficient and reliable method of dewatering from nice depths, as an alternative of using multiple smaller pumps to switch water to floor. 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 price effectiveness of this answer, an necessary advantage is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering perform,” he says. “It also reduces the cost and maintenance requirements of having a number of pumping stations at different ranges throughout the mine.”
The reputation of GEHO® pumps has also been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and growth into its pumps’ put on components. This process relies on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system in which the pump operates.
“Taking under consideration how our pumps work together with these systems, we focus on key aspects of the pumps such because 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 shifting components transfer in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to control the volume of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is done by way of the PLC management, to ensure that the diaphragm runs in the right place.
“Rubber is good at bending, but if it stretches it can tear,” he says. “Our goal is to extend the alternative intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to reduce both their downtime and their total price of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted by way of digital technology so that operators can keep abreast – in real time – of the pump’s performance and situation. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to clients, informing the upkeep 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 choice to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ global service network, making certain that wherever our pumps are operating there will be an skilled local service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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