Useful tips on how to succeed at pumping slurry

When using mining slurry pumps in Australia, a variety of factors should be considered to ensure satisfactory service. Plants often handle slurries in Mining Pump applications ranging from wastewater treatment to processing. Dealing with slurries is challenging. Some elements in pumping slurries are the nature and size of solids in the liquid and the kind of abrasive wear and tear they cause. Another issue is the corrosiveness of the slurry.

Sites rely on centrifugal pumps to pump slurry. These pumps need special provisions that require detailed knowledge of the slurry properties to prevent corrosion, wear, erosion and other effects such as settling of solids. Specifying the best combination of geometry, speed and materials require properly balancing often conflicting priorities of pumps. This demands consideration of maximum wear life, stable operations, minimal energy consumption and operational flexibility.

Read on to find out some practical rules and guidelines for centrifugal pumps for pumping slurries. We will also talk about the key operational features, selection of materials and other considerations when it comes to pumping slurries.

Tailored pumps

The most widely used pumps for slurry services are horizontal centrifugal pumps although vertical pumps and other types of pumps are used for specific applications. When choosing centrifugal pumps for pumping slurries, it is important to consider pumps that are tailored to particular services that reflect the abrasive or corrosive nature of slurry and the concentration of solids. These include the choice of materials, different driver sizing and use of liners.

When choosing the right mining slurry pump processing, it is important to provide adequate service life. Corrosion and erosion effects of slurries such as impingement of the high-velocity flow of solid and liquid mixtures are challenging. In a lot of applications, some solids in the slurry are larger than the usual specified particles so the pump should be able to pass these particles without any operational problems or damage.

This means that a slurry pump is larger than its clear liquid counterparts. It generally sacrifices the efficiency, both efficiencies over the whole range of operation and maximum efficiency in exchange for the ability to achieve good operation in such challenging services.

Wear is a function of velocity so slurry pumps’ speed should be as low as possible. Often, direct coupling between a low-speed electric motor and the pump makes more sense. On the other hand, a lot of other applications favor gearboxes to meet the desired speed. In services that require variable flow during operation, variable frequency drives provide the necessary continual speed changes.

While the emphasis on a slurry pump is on the percentage and size of solids to be pumped, corrosion resistance is an important factor when choosing materials in many applications. The material chosen in such cases should provide an adequate combination of both corrosion and erosion resistance.

For slurry services, mining slurry pumps operating on the left of the performance curve or at the BEP is usually preferred. The related point should therefore lie somewhere between eighty-five percent and a hundred percent of the BEP point.