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Piston pumps will shortly be helping to save a town centre in - England. Weir Netherlands has secured a contract to supply two GEHO model DHC paste pumps, which will assist in a project to stabilise four abandoned salt mines in the UK.
The town of Northwich, in North West England, recently received £28 million funding to fill the old rock-salt workings, which extend over 40 acres.
Traditionally, only eight per cent of the available salt was left unworked in the mines to act as supporting pillars, therefore subsidence and the possibility of a mine collapse has been an ever-present restraint on the town's development. At one point Cheshire County Council considered relocating the town centre.
Stabilisation of the Northwich mines will be a unique and immensely complicated undertaking. The plan is to fill the four mines with a cement grout and at the same time remove the brine used to fill the disused mines. A pipeline specially laid beneath the bed of the River Weaver, will carry brine away from the mines, whilst grout for the filling will travel in the opposite direction.
Wrekin Construction Company, the main contractor, anticipates the project will take three years to complete and will involve removing in the region of threequarters of a million cubic metres of brine.
Simultaneously, almost a million tonnes of grout paste composed of pulverised fuel ash, cement and salt will be pumped in to the caverns.
The GEHO pumps supplied will be capable of transporting a 65% - concentration mixture of fuel ash, cement, salt and brine at a rate of 100 cubic metres per hour, over 2.5 km distance and against 60 bar pressure.
Wrekin engineers visited a similar project, using GEHO pumps, at the Unterbreizbach rock salt mine in Germany, where they looked at issues resulting from the corrosive and self-hardening nature of the cemented saline paste. The engineers saw how GEHO and Kali+Salz have implemented material modifications to reduce the rate of erosion and wear within the saline environment.
The site visit proved that when dealing with challenging applications GEHO can work with customers to produce innovative pump technology solutions to meet their specific needs.
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