Pumps manufacturing company Walter Meano Engineering has improved the efficiency of its VersaFlo vertical spindle electric (VSE) 100 pump by redesigning the solution’s 30-year-old impeller.

The VSE pump is used at mines in Africa to pump water and now offers customers enhanced pumping capabilities, pumping more water using slightly more power.

“The key difference of our design is the separate wear plate – other designs have a combined screen and wear plate. “This allows us to change existing pumps to the new design,” says Walter Meano Engineering MD Detlev Borner.

The company finalised the new design in October last year, after in-house tests had been verified at the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), he highlights.

The redesigned impeller has a maximum efficiency of 69%, compared with the 54% of the old impeller.

Borner notes that the impeller’s previous design was kept the same across the range of pumps to manufacture high volumes at low cost, but that the new design further enhances the pump’s efficiency, through impeller and wear plate design and optimisation, with a 100 mm outer diameter and 270 mm impeller diameter.

He asserts that using a standard impeller across the range of pumps results in low efficiency and it is important that each model’s impeller is enhanced and that these changes can be implemented on existing pumps.

Advantages
Borner notes that the new design is manufactured locally by Walter Meano Engineering, and that the company can tailor the VSE pumps to meet specific client requirements.

“One of the most important advantages of the design includes being able to change it to meet a client’s requirements by providing different sizes of impellers. If clients want to have less or more water pumped, we can manufacture impellers accordingly.”

Further, he notes that, although the new design uses between 9% and 13% more power, the pump’s output increases by between 36% and 48%; therefore, clients can save up to R1 000 a month because of reduced electricity consumption.

Maintenance for the new design is significantly easier, as the wear plate in the impeller is not combined with a screen, he points out.

Borner comments that it is important when selecting a pump to consider whether the outcomes will be optimal in terms of operational requirements.

“Our strategy is to provide an on-site service that produces the most efficient outcomes for a mine. “[Thus], we will continue to design our products to enhance existing pumps, but also provide components that are easy to use in existing models while achieving better efficiency,” Borner concludes.

The VersaFlo VSE 100 pump is manufactured in accordance with the SABS ISO 9001 – 2008 Quality Management System.