The Largest Piston Diaphragm Pump in the World: From the Drawing Board to Operational Experience

摘要

Over the years it has become apparent that the demand for high flow rate pipelines, either for concentrate or tailings slurry, is continuously increasing. At the same time the industry recognized the advantages of piston diaphragm pumps when compared to multistage centrifugal pump installations. As the unit capacity of conventional piston diaphragm pumps was limited, a large number of low capacity piston diaphragm pumps needed to be installed in parallel to meet the required capacity. This resulted in high costs for purchase of these pumps, as well as high costs for infrastructure around the pumps, such as piping, cabling, booster pumps etc. For this reason, FELUWA decided to develop a large piston diaphragm pump with a capacity of up to 1000 m~3/hr, which increases the unit capacity of such pumps by about 50 %. The pump is of 5 cylinder, single acting configuration and is equipped with double hoses diaphragms, rather than with single flat diaphragms. In 2011, 4 Nos. of these pumps were supplied to a copper mine in Mexico for the transfer of copper tailings and the first operational data have become available. Each pump has a capacity of 750 m?/hr at a pressure up to 45 bar.