Got Hard Rock? Choose the MDX Pump

Drawing on many years of designing slurry pumps for mining, KSB GIW, Inc. has custom-engineered slurry pumps that combine advanced materials, hydraulics, and patented mechanical designs. One of our latest products is the Mill Duty Extra Heavy pump, also known as the MDX, which is designed to tackle the most extreme conditions.

Especially suited for hard rock applications, the MDX has helped customers around the world overcome the challenges of extracting metal and mineral deposits. The MDX pump’s advanced hydraulic technology provides a predictable wear life, which translates into a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for you.

Today, we’re highlighting the MDX pump’s features and capabilities, and how we’re improving it to make it even more powerful in the future.

Meet the MDX

Understanding the nature of slurries and how they behave when being pumped has been fundamental to the development of the MDX. GIW has been obtaining slurry samples from customers over many years for testing hydraulics and materials. Research & Development facilities include multiple slurry test beds on the campus, together with a hydraulics laboratory that is dedicated to pump performance testing. These activities are central to the company’s pump development programs.

KSB GIW, Inc.’s massive investment in research, development, and manufacturing has advanced the design of all of GIW pump products, materials, and wear-resistant components. The MDX is no exception.

• Superior material technology: proprietary white-iron alloy proven in the field to increase the life of wear parts.
• Larger impeller diameter: lowers the pump’s operation and specific speed, which leads to longer part wear life.
• Thicker cross-section: gives the MDX a long and reliable pump service life.
• Deep base circle: minimizes aggressive particle impingement, which provides a sliding wear action and lowers abrasive wear.
• Oversized shrouds: enhances vane performance and adds clearing action, minimizing recirculation and wear between the impeller and suction liner.
• Inlet five-vane impeller: designed to handle liquid and solid phases in the slurry, helping the MDX maximize performance and wear life.
• Adjustable suction liner: helps operators match their operating cycle times with scheduled outages, maximizing their productivity and lowering costs.
• Slurry diverter: increases the suction liner life by reducing particle recirculation between the impeller and liner.

The MDX design allows for a wide discharge range between 150 and 750 mm, and boasts flow rates up to 14,000 m^3/hr. It can reach up to 51 m of head and features a pressure rating up to 150 psi.

Hard rock applications

The MDX can tackle a variety of applications, but it is especially suitable for hard rock comminution. Hard rock mining requires the use of one or more grinding stages for reducing crushed run-of-mine ore down to a suitable particle size for liberating the product from gangue materials. The MDX has consistently met customer expectations within the following applications:

• Semiautogenous (SAG) and ball mill circuits: In SAG operations, both balls and the ore itself assist in the grinding process. This mechanism is used in mining operations that require grinding to finer particle sizes, need high capacity, or need to grind multiple types of ore at once. The MDX can help operators tackle these applications by reducing their consumption of lining plates and grinding media.
• Ball and rod mill discharge: Rod mills are best in wet applications, where the slurry has up to 50% solids by mass; however, these can be used in dry applications as well. The MDX pump’s hard metal construction resists damage in the event of rod tanglings.
• Cyclone and screen feed: In this application, cyclones separate heavy from light slurry components. There are a variety of design principles that go into cyclones to achieve various cuts of the media. Pressure drop across the cyclone is defined by a variety of parameters both intrinsic to the cyclone/separator and the pump feeding it. The MDX pump is designed to achieve the total head to the cyclone, plus the calculated or predicted pressure drop across the cyclone.

Need a reliable pump that can tackle the most severe duty slurry? Get in touch with us today.

The GIW single-wall, all-metal MDX pump design has become the Gold Standard for comminution applications within Hard Rock mining. The metal design is more forgiving than rubber-lined pumps in operations where ball chips have escaped from the mills. A single ball chip, caught between the impeller and shell, can tear a rubber lining and cause the pump to fail, leading to unplanned downtime and high costs. The MDX pump offers a more predictable wear life and a lower risk of catastrophic failure.

Operators can count on the MDX’s sturdy construction and long-wearing materials — products of our Metallurgy Lab — to survive the heaviest duty slurry and maximize production.

Continual improvement

The MDX pump’s benefits do not end there. Since the day it launched, we have worked to improve its hydraulic design so that our customers can keep their pumps operating at top efficiency.

The latest upgrade is the addition of the Remotely Adjusted Mechanical Suction Liner technology, also known as RAMSL. The RAMSL improves maintenance procedures on the MDX by allowing for remote adjustments to the internal clearance between the impeller nose and the suction liner. With the addition of the RAMSL technology, maintenance time plummets from a few hours to a few minutes.

The MDX pump is the best choice for extra heavy mill duty operations. No other pump on the market can match its rugged design and reliable operation. For over a decade, the MDX has delivered on its promise to improve productivity and lower TCO.