WATER & WASTE TREATMENT INDUSTRY FOCUS ENHANCED EFFICIENCY THANKS TO A NEW GEOMETRY
Successful trials of Lontra’s Blade Compressor at Severn Trent Water’s Worcester plant has resulted in the large scale replacement of conventional ‘blowers’. Steve Lindsey, founder and CEO of Lontra, says this could achieve electricity cost savings of £1.8m/year
S
evern Trent Water is amongst the largest of the ten regulated water and
wastewater companies in England and Wales. It employs over 5,000 people and serves around 4 million households and businesses across the UK, delivering customers 1.8 billion litres of drinking water a day.
Severn Trent’s wastewater treatment
systems operate around the clock, handling more than 2.5 billion litres of wastewater every day. Operating and maintaining the vast network of sewers and treatment works is a huge and resource intensive engineering challenge. It requires regular, large scale investment to maintain the quality standards demanded by regulators, politicians and customers. The activated sludge process relies on
the injection of air into wastewater, encouraging the large-scale growth of natural bacteria that break down its impurities. The traditional compressors, or “blowers”, that are used to inject air into wastewater consume vast quantities of electricity, costing Severn Trent over £9 million a year. This is more than half the entire cost of wastewater treatment. Given the cost of electricity consumption
– and the associated CO2 emissions – for a long period, Severn Trent Water had been investigating alternative solutions with lower energy costs, improved operational efficiency and reduced environmental impact. Their answer eventually came in the form of the Lontra Blade Compressor. The technology is best imagined as a piston and cylinder, but with the cylinder wrapped around. With a traditional piston and cylinder
machine, as the piston drops down in the cylinder, it draws in air above it and, as it goes up again, compresses air in front of it. Using new geometry, the Lontra Blade Compressor uses a circular mechanism to replace the old rotary technology, compressing air – or gas – in front and inducing air behind in continuous motion, minimising waste. This means it has an almost continuous
cycle of drawing in air behind and compressing air in front. This new geometry that is quieter, smoother and more efficient.
In the case of Severn Trent Water, the first step was to work out just how important the Lontra technology could be to its business and so the company worked for over a year with Lontra on a
SECURING EFFECTIVE ENTRY INTO THE CAPACITY MARKET
Launched to ensure sufficient reliable electricity capacity is available, the Capacity Market provides an opportunity for businesses to receive revenue by ensuring sufficient generation or load capacity management to the grid at times of system stress. With the market in its infancy, water company Anglian Water approached IMServ to help them ensure entry. “The Capacity Market has strict guidelines for market entry, and with a deadline of only eight weeks to
complete installation, we had to work quickly with Anglian Water and Electricity Market Reform Settlement (EMRS) to determine the initial project requirements before beginning our approach,” said Katrina Coombes, Bureau manager at IMServ. A bespoke Capacity Metering solution of 77 meters on back up on-site generation was installed, and
IMServ created the technical WP197 Metering Statements, which passed the EMRS validation. By employing end-to-end project management and a consultative approach, any issues that arose throughout the complex process were quickly resolved. One challenge was the production of metering packs containing CT and metering certificates as well as
data from the installed meters, in a format that would achieve approval from EMRS. To add to the pressure, the approval process took time, and there was no room for error. Finally, Anglian Water and IMServ attended a metering test and site audit with EMRS, in order to ensure
compliance with the EMRS guidelines. Subsequent audits have also taken place since the approval, with a 100% success rate. The result was Anglian Water securing entry into the Capacity Market, enabling it to receive ongoing revenue from the scheme. Tom Lee, Energy Contracts and Information manager at Anglian Water, said: “IMServ were quick to
respond to our request for a quotation and tailored a service that met our requirements. The short timescale was very challenging but IMServ showed excellent flexibility, depth of knowledge and expertise to enable us to successfully obtain our Metering Test Certificate from EMRS.” IMServ
www.imserv.com
The Lontra Blade Compressor’s new geometry is quieter, smoother and more efficient
study evaluating its entire wastewater estate. This allowed Lontra to take a fresh look at the challenges faced in wastewater treatment and to design a solution specifically optimised to the needs of the industry as a whole. The results were so encouraging that Severn Trent agreed to part-fund a full scale trial alongside the Carbon Trust. The Blade Compressor was first used at Worcester in September 2012. After running full time as a ‘duty blower’ without issue for more than seven months, Severn Trent acknowledged its core reliability and performance. The site’s instrumentation and SCADA system showed that the conventional blowers used over 21% more electricity to deliver an equivalent amount of air when compared to the Blade Compressor. The results revealed that, should the Lontra Blade Compressor be rolled out across all of Severn Trent’s wastewater treatment works, the company could save more than £1.8 million a year in electricity costs and cut 3% of the company’s carbon emissions. The magnitude of the potential savings was enough for Severn Trent to consider a large scale replacement programme. To confirm the saving beyond doubt, the on- site instrumentation for the Blade Compressor and the comparative blower were upgraded to laboratory standard. By the end of the trial, the Blade
Compressor had been running for more than 10,000 hours, the equivalent of more than three years of normal operation without issue. Manufacture of machines incorporating
the Blade Compressor technology by Lontra’s partner Sulzer has now begun, with production compressors shipping to Severn Trent Water and their equivalents across Europe.
Lontra
lontra.co.uk/blade-compressor/
PROCESS & CONTROL | SEPTEMBER 2017 31
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