Experience reason for competitive advantage, pumps' longevity

Pumps manufacturer Mather + Platt claims to have built up one of the largest number of pumps operating in the South African mining and water sectors.

Mather + Platt marketing and business development manager Dave Johnson tells Mining Weekly that pumps that have been installed and working for more than 50 years are only now being refurbished.

With 170 years of experience in manufacturing pumps globally, and having done so for the last 60 years in South Africa, the company offers pumps technology that is based on decades of research and development.

Further, it is this extensive experience that helped Mather + Platt to assist its subsidiary company, APE Pumps, in completing a major portion of a €16million upgrade project in Malawi, at the end of October 2015.

Financed by the World and European Investment Bank, the project entailed the rehabilitation of pipelines and the pump- stations supplying water from the Shire river to Blantyre.

Mather + Platt also manufactured eight multistage pumps, each with electrical motors and a capacity of 750 m3/h at a head of 550 m, for the Chileka pumpstation, in Malawi. All the pumps are powered by 1 650 kW electric motors.

Johnson tells Mining Weekly that, in September last year, the company launched a new range of split case pumps that have a flow rate of up to 10 000 m3/h and a head of up to 200 m.

“These pumps can be manufactured from various materials, depending on the application and their horizontal or vertical orientation, which is determined by the amount of space available at the installation site,” he says.

The Mather + Platt range also features multistage pumps for mine dewatering and bulk- water, high-pressure applications. These pumps have a flow rate of up to 1 200 m3/h and a head of up to 18 000 m,” explains Johnson.

The company is also the sole distributor of Vanton thermoplastic chemical pumps in South Africa.

The wet-end components of a Vanton pump are made from corrosion- and abrasion-resistant engineered plastics
such as polypropylene and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and chlorinated PVC.

He explains that the standard material pumps are manufactured at the company’s Wadeville factory, in Germiston, Gauteng; however, pump components manufactured from exotic materials, such as duplex, are manufactured at the WPIL factory, in Manchester, in the UK. The company then assembles the exotic components at the factory in Germiston.

Mather + Platt was established in Manchester, in 1845, after which it established a factory and offices in South Africa in 1954.

The company is currently owned by Indian pumps specialist WPIL, which acquired the company in 2012 and still owns the original Mather + Platt factory, in the UK.