The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® optimistic displacement pumps has ensured they play a key role in decreasing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well known in various 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’ ability to pump extremely viscous slurry, permitting mines to preserve water. The power efficiency of pipeline transportation additionally helps cut 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 additionally allowed us to be pioneers within the pumping of very acidic materials at excessive temperatures, corresponding to 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, offering some of the value efficient and sustainable switch strategies out there to the mining business. These pumps have also played an integral function within 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, attaining the necessary beach slope on its tailings facility to meet its life-of-mine technique.
Backfilling is a crucial technique for mining to achieve security and environmental objectives, 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 worked out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps present an environment friendly and reliable way of dewatering from nice depths, instead of using multiple smaller pumps to switch water to floor. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do that by pumping from the bottom of a mine to the floor in just one lift – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the fee effectiveness of this answer, an important benefit is that it reduces the danger of 1 pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the whole dewatering perform,” he says. “It additionally reduces the price and maintenance necessities of having a number of pumping stations at completely different levels throughout the mine.”

The popularity of GEHO® pumps has additionally been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and improvement into its pumps’ wear elements. This course of is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system by which the pump operates.
“Taking into account how our pumps interact with these systems, we give consideration to key features of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid provides the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm guaranteeing that all the moving components transfer in oil and not slurry.
He emphasises the significance of diaphragm dynamics and the want to management the amount of propelling liquid in the chamber. ไดอะแฟรม ซีล is completed by way of the PLC management, 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 replacement intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to reduce each their downtime and their complete value of possession.”

The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is performed through digital technology in order that operators can stay 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 range, and is even exploring prospects for transferring coarse ore to the floor from deep in a mine – as a less expensive choice to traditional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ international service network, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are working there shall be an experienced native service crew to help them,” he concludes.
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