MechChem Africa November-December 2024

⎪ Minerals processing and materials handling ⎪

without opening the pump case. “At the mine, we remove the entire clam shell, and immediately drop in a new one with a new set of liners and components. We then take the worn pump clam shell to our shop and within a few weeks, we refurbish it under tightly controlled conditions. “This requires intricate work and the individual impellers, liners and other com ponents are very heavy. By doing it at our facility, a mine sees only a rapid swap out that both minimises downtime and ensures that the refurbishment is done to OEM stan dards,” he says, adding that this approach is now standard on all WARMAN ® MC pumps of this size. Moving over to the WARMAN ® MCR ® pump on display, Marnus Koorts starts to outline some of the innovative features of this gi ant pump. “Our designs are based on more than 100 years of fundamental and applied research, which continues to include many wear performance field trials,” he says. “Slight changes in the shape can be seen as small details, but compared to simpler impeller designs, they make a huge differ ence, in terms of both efficiency and wear life,” Marnus Koorts tells MechChem Africa. Advanced features of the WARMAN ® MCR ® pump

“While most severe duty impellers are de signed to be bigger and heavier to extend their wear life, ours incorporate a host of subtle flow enhancement features that have a significant effect on performance, reliability and life,” he adds. NEXT intelligent solution for optimising processing circuits Weir’s NEXT Intelligent Solutions cut across all of the company’s processing equipment, optimising performance, tracking wear and monitoring machine health. “On our large pumps we use vibration sensors on the outside of the pump casing to measure the vibrations inside of the pump, temperature sensors for the bearing assemblies, and we continuously monitor the electrical pa rameters on the pump motor, for example,” continues Koorts. All this data, he says can be analysed and used to determine exactly how efficiently the pump is running; how worn the impeller or the liner is; and when it makes the most sense to intervene. When an issue is identified, Weir’s NEXT monitoring system can help operators to predict the potential consequences, how long the pump can continue to run safely, what is likely to fail and the extent of the resulting damage. “It may be possible to

continue to run the plant until a scheduled shutdown, production might need to be trimmed back a little until a pump can be re paired, or if the problem is more serious, the need for an unscheduled shutdown can be properly justified and managed,” he explains, adding that NEXT solutions identify risks so that managers can take in-time decisions to protect their assets. Properly tracking the wear life of lin ers can save operators a huge amount of money, he says. “A set of spares for one of our severe duty large pumps can cost a sig nificant amount. A NEXT service contract is negligible compared to the risk of causing irreparable damage to the pump, it can also maximise the life of these spares, saving a fortune on unnecessary replacements. “And a catastrophic breakdown on some of these critical pumps can stop the entire site, which makes the risk of not knowing what is happening inside their mill circuit pumps way too high,” he argues. “Our WARMAN MCR 650 slurry pump is a benchmark mill circuit pump that not only offers best performance, uptime, flexibility and wear life, it also delivers high energy ef ficiency and lower costs of ownership, mak ing it a flagship technology for sustainable mining,” concludes Marnus Koorts. www.global.weir

Weir staff servicing a Warman MCR 400 at a copper mine.

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