Scotland-headquartered specialist slurry equipment solutions provider Weir Minerals has been focusing on enhancing its growing pumps portfolio through ongoing investment in research and development (R&D), with a focus on improving materials technologies to increase wear life and offer clients a lower total cost of ownership.

Weir Minerals Africa strategic marketing and communications manager René Calitz tells Mining Weekly that the company’s strategy is to offer an entire life-cycle model which is designed, engineered and developed to offer clients the best technology at the lowest cost of ownership over the life of the equipment.

“There are extensive, already installed and older technologies across Africa. We believe that new materials development is needed to enhance these products and technologies’ performance through the improvement of wear rates, thus reducing operating costs and minimising downtime.

“Weir Minerals constantly strives to become its customers’ trusted partner of choice. We leverage our global knowledge base and access to the very best and latest technologies to deliver solutions to our Africa-based clients,” says Calitz.

She adds that, even though Weir Minerals Africa is based in South Africa, the company’s expertise is not limited to offering solutions to the local market. “The collaborative approach that extends across the Weir Group ensures that, no matter where our clients are based, they have access to world-class products,” she explains.

Weir Minerals Africa sales, marketing and engineering director Rob Fawcett tells Mining Weekly that the company is constantly evolving. Over the past five years, the company has invested in building its manufacturing capacity and sales and service centre infrastructure in close proximity to its clients’ operations.

He says Weir Minerals has also transformed through various acquisitions, the most recent being the acquisition of Weir Heavy Bay Foundry, in Port Elizabeth, which can manufacture castings of up to 18 nett tons in weight.

“From a technology perspective, we have been actively introducing the latest pumps technology onto the African market. For instance, we offer the SLR rubber-lined pumps range in sizes from 15 mm to 250 mm in diameter for medium- to light-duty pumping solutions.

“In addition, we offer an updated version of the AH pumps range, the WBH, which is also available in rubber and metal from 50 mm to 300 mm”, explains Fawcett.

Moreover, he highlights that the company focuses on the area of mill circuit improvement, as the company believes that mills are key to any operation’s functioning, adding that Weir Minerals has specifically designed a pumps range to handle what it believes to be one of the hardest-wearing heavy-duty applications.

Fawcett adds that Weir Minerals has improved the wear on standard components of the older AH pumps range through the introduction of wear-reduction technology, which can result in wear improvements of up to 50%, as well as improvements in efficiency, thus reducing the total cost of ownership.

“ This has proven particularly beneficial to our customers who are sweating their assets in an adverse market environment,” he elaborates.

Anglo Collaboration

Fawcett tells Mining Weekly that Weir Minerals Africa has been working with diversified mining conglomerate Anglo American and that, over the past three years, Weir Minerals has implemented various solutions to ensure that the mining company’s pumps function more optimally and more cost efficiently.

According to a project description report that Anglo American compiled as part of its entry to the 2014 Procurement Leaders Global Awards, which the miner and Weir Minerals won, Anglo American uses about 30 000 pumps at its operations and, as part of the collaboration, Weir Minerals redesigned parts of Anglo’s pumps, which were retrofitted to existing pumps to yield immediate gains in reliability and power savings.

In the report, Anglo American states that the retrofits resulted in the life span of key components being doubled and power consumption being reduced significantly – in some cases by up to 7%.

“The most significant benefit these changes bring to Anglo American is a reduction in the risk of downtime, maintenance downtime and required resources. Pumps are critical to our operations.

“The effect on operations when a key pump breaks down is a direct loss of revenue, as 99% of the processes at operations rely on the movement of slurry pulp and water. “Without pressurised fluid transfer, there would be no product to sell,” explains the miner.

Fawcett concludes that Weir Minerals’ collaboration with Anglo American is ongoing, adding that the miner aims to expand Weir’s services to some of its other operations.