PUMPS
Warman ® pumps, now part of Weir Minerals, celebrate their 80th anniversary this year
Maintaining constant flow
Paul Moore reports on a landmark anniversary for Warman, plus continued technology updates from key suppliers in the mining pump market
Mining pumps have a long history of handling tough wastewaters and slurries, and heritage is something very much stressed in the industry in terms of proven designs. This year sees Weir Minerals celebrate the 80th anniversary of Warman ®, arguably the most famous pump brand globally. Ricardo Garib, Weir Minerals President:“ From humble beginnings in 1938, the range of the Warman brand has grown from representing one small pump designed in an outback gold mining town, to a market leading brand serving hundreds of mine sites around the world.”
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the Warman ® brand spread throughout Australia, then in the 1960s manufacturing licences were granted to export Warman ® pumps to the UK, Japan, the USA and South Africa.
“ Warman continued to grow and by 1979 had manufacturing and marketing subsidiaries in the UK and the USA and a manufacturing licensee in Brazil. In 1980, Warman started manufacturing in China. Strong growth occurred in the 1990s in Latin America, Europe, and further into the USA. In 1999 Warman International( and later CH Warman) was acquired by the Weir Group, joining Envirotech and making us unrivalled in slurry transportation. Today, Warman pumps have an unrivalled global footprint, running from the cold fields of Russia, the Canadian oil sands, the Andean Mountains to the African desert. Charles Warman understood what his customers needed and did his best to give them a solution they wanted. This is a blueprint that we follow.
Just like Charles Warman did in those early days, understanding our customers’ needs is at the forefront of our growth strategy,” states Garib.
Warman ® pumps’ global success
Weir Minerals has a long history of helping customers increase productivity and reduce downtime with their Warman ® pumps; the following outlines some recent successes at sites across the globe.
In 2017, OceanaGold of New Zealand was looking to improve the wear life of their existing rubber lined pumps – a Warman ® MCR ® 250 pump and a competitor pump. Both of these pumps were lasting 1,650 hours on average.
Through an ongoing onsite trial with a larger, Warman ® MCR ® 350 pump, the Weir Minerals team determined that the reason for the suboptimal wear life was that the rubber liners were failing before the alloy impeller and throatbush. It was concluded that particles within the slurry were too coarse for the rubber liners.
After a thorough review of the existing equipment and operational data from the site, the Weir Minerals team selected the alloy lined Warman ® MCU ® 250 pump with pre-swirl vanes for this application. Additionally, the impeller was redesigned to better distribute the coarse and fine particles across the hydraulic components. Utilising alloy instead of rubber, the MCU ® 250 pump lasted 5,000 hours in operation. This is more than 200 % longer than either of the incumbent pumps. In addition, the operating cost of the MCU ® 250 pump was up to 30 % less than that of either of the incumbent pumps, and only required two rebuilds per year, whereas the previous pumps required four. The OceanaGold and Weir Minerals teams were able to not only solve the challenge on site, but also develop an efficient and cost effective solution to help OceanaGold get the most out of their equipment.
Yara’ s Siilinjärvi mine in Finland recently introduced new flotation technology to improve the utilisation of fine particles from ore material at their mine. Typically, ore extracted from the Yara mine contains 10 % apatite, 20 % calcium carbonate and 65 % phlogopite, which is hard to separate. Chemicals have to be used in the separation process to help keep the froth stable, but sometimes the froth will not collapse and overflows, creating difficult unstable pumping conditions. Pumping froth slurry is a challenging task for a centrifugal slurry pump especially in an unstable flotation process which suffers from the huge variations of Froth Volume Factor( FVF).
The staff at Warman Chile and Weir Minerals President Ricardo Garib( front row, fifth from left) posing with a large Warman centrifugal pump
JUNE 2018 | International Mining 39