GIW Industries, a leader in the design, manufacture, and application of heavy-duty, centrifugal slurry pumps, has announced a successful installation at a unnamed South American copper mine. The GIW solution “quadrupled pump wear life and created dramatic savings for the mine’s tailing-pumping operations.”

“Copper mining involves working with some of the harshest materials in the world. As a result, mining companies must carefully monitor wear of their slurry pumps and schedule frequent shutdowns to replace worn parts. The cost of this maintenance goes far beyond just the price of parts; downtime and lost revenue can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says GIW. “The South American company had struggled for years to reduce maintenance downtime in its tailings operations…the material was wearing out pumps more quickly than other equipment in the tailings line, increasing the frequency of downtime.”

Ronnie Willis, Senior Product Manager — New Materials at GIW, says, “They were having such severe wear that they were repairing the tailings pumps every 400 to 450 hours.” When considering replacement parts, manpower, and revenue lost due to downtime, the costs the copper mine was facing on a regular basis were significant and they needed a solution for more efficient operations.

A GIW LSA centrifugal slurry pump was installed in a tailings booster application where GIW’s exclusive Enduraclad™ material was applied to the new suction liner. “With the application of this new material,” Willis says, “they’ve been able to extend wear life up to 2,000 hours and also improved wear life of other related pump parts.” When Enduraclad made its debut in 2009, its uses were limited. It was only applied to suction liners and increased wear life up to three times. But since then, its capabilities have expanded to allow coating on other essential parts and enables it to provide even greater longevity for GIW pumps.

“Although Enduraclad-bonded parts are more expensive, they are well worth the price. They will cost more than uncoated parts, such as suction liners,” says Willis. “However, you are saving on costs by using fewer parts, reducing maintenance costs, and not suffering the downtime revenue loss. To remove and replace the parts on one of these pumps requires two to four people working with tools and lifting devices for 6 to 8 hours. So the longer you can keep the pump running with nobody touching it, the more operational costs you save.”