Mining & Minerals
Case:
CLEANING A VALVE
TERRAFAME | FINLAND
By cleaning the valve to remove fouling, the leak was stopped. This allowed the pumping station to be shut down for maintenance and cleaning.
ISSUE
Terrafame uses a bioleaching process to extract nickel and zinc from the mined ore. Leaching extraction requires many ponds where the extract is stored and circulated back to the heap or to the metals production plant. Circulating the extract requires many pumping stations. These pumping stations suffer from heavy scaling and it causes the valves to leak due to the scaling. Therefore, they were not able to isolate the pumping station for regular cleaning. This results in closing off more than one pumping station and emptying the ponds in between. This is really time consuming and causes a significant disturbance in the process.
SOLUTION
Altum's solution was installed on one of the pumping station valves. The project was performed and cleaning the valve from fouling took only a few hours.
RESULTS
Valve was cleaned, and the plant was able to shut it and isolate the pumping station for cleaning.
