Weir Minerals Africa : Pumping innovation underpins GEHO success

The technical advancement of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key function in decreasing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well-known in various 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, allowing mines to conserve water. ที่วัดแรงดัน of pipeline transportation additionally helps reduce power 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, corresponding to 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, providing some of the price effective and sustainable switch strategies obtainable 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 move tailings from the plant, attaining the necessary beach slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a crucial methodology for mining to realize 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 material – measuring 70% solids by weight – again into the mine’s worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an efficient and dependable means of dewatering from nice depths, instead of utilizing a number of smaller pumps to switch water to floor. The highly effective GEHO® pump range can do that 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 solution, an essential benefit is that it reduces the danger of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the entire dewatering operate,” he says. “It also reduces the cost and maintenance necessities of getting a quantity of pumping stations at completely different ranges within the mine.”
The status 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 parts. This process is based on an in-depth understanding of the entire pumping system during which the pump operates.
“Taking into consideration how our pumps interact with these methods, 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 guaranteeing that every one the moving elements move in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the necessity to control the quantity of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is completed by way of the PLC management, to make sure that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our purpose is to extend the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, helping mines to scale back both their downtime and their whole cost of possession.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is conducted through digital expertise in order that operators can keep abreast – in actual time – of the pump’s efficiency and condition. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to prospects, 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 possibilities for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a more cost effective option to conventional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ international service network, ensuring that wherever our pumps are working there might be an experienced native service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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