Flygt Concertor intelligent pumps have become a standard design for Heathrow Airport’s wastewater management systems, following a successful trial, writes Synneve Henningson, senior product manager, Xylem UK and Ireland.
London’s Heathrow Airport is one of Europe’s busiest airports, with an average of 34,000 flights arriving and departing every month.
Aircraft toilets use a vacuum system – with a fraction of the water of domestic systems – to remove aircraft waste. Therefore, aircraft toilet waste tends to have a higher proportion of non-biological solids, including wipes, plastics and nappies, compared to typical utility network flows.
This was causing one of the Heathrow’s dual pumping stations, which manages aircraft wastewater streams, to experience chronic clogging issues. As well as frequent reactive maintenance visits to address clogging, the pumping station wet well required cleaning on a six-monthly basis.
In November 2015, the airport’s water services department, a Xylem customer for 33 years, installed and trialled Xylem’s Flygt Concertor intelligent wastewater pumping system on the pump station to solve chronic clogging issues. A single Flygt Concertor N6020 pump, complete with intelligent pumping station control system XPC, was set to run the station on its own, with the remaining N3127 pump set to operate just on a high level purely as backup.
A Concertor pump with the XPC system adjusts the pump’s speed and performance to remove liquid and solids, using the lowest amount of power possible for the pump flow produced. The pump also has self-cleaning functionality, which virtually eliminates blockages.
The station and Flygt Concertor is monitored by Heathrow Airport’s telemetry system and Xylem’s Avensor remote-monitoring platform.
As of December 2023, the original trial Flygt Concertor pump had required just one reactive site attendance in the eight years since installation. There had been no requirement to clean the wet well during the same period, delivering significant cost savings of approximately 87.5% of the annual costs in cleaning and site attendance.
Additionally, the energy consumption of the pumping station had reduced by 53% – consistent over the eight-year period. The system had delivered proven reliability at the lowest total cost of ownership, while reducing energy consumption, helping Heathrow to achieve its operating expenditure (OPEX) and sustainability goals. The model has since been built into Heathrow’s new standard for airport wastewater pumping station design.
Having experienced the benefits from the original pilot scheme, Heathrow Airport invested in the Flygt Concertor system across its asset base. This investment includes complete XPC systems and a stock of Flygt Concertor pumps to replace existing submersible wastewater pumps. As of December 2023, the team had rolled out the Flygt Concertor to a further eight pump station assets, replacing legacy submersible pumps.
Adaptive system
The Flygt Concertor system comprises a Concertor submersible electric pump and advanced panel-mounted monitoring and intelligent control system that senses the operating conditions of the pump within the station environment and adapts performance in real-time to provide feedback to station operators.
The system’s patented energy minimiser function, together with patented Adaptive-N hydraulics and a motor efficiency comparable to IE4, ensures that the pumps run at their most efficient duty point. An integrated control system makes it quicker and easier to set-up and operate functions that would otherwise require a very sophisticated monitoring and control system.
Due to Heathrow’s 24/7 operations, its water services department requires a high level of autonomy to address issues quickly. Xylem’s Flygt Concertor enables Heathrow’s engineers to deploy the Concertor Pump quickly and easily at pumping stations when needs arise.
Dan Young, Heathrow senior engineer – water systems technical services, said:
“Heathrow was an early adopter of Flygt Concertor. The original pump, installed in November 2015, continues to produce cost savings and maintenance benefits, as it did from the beginning.
“We have rolled out the Flygt Concertor in a further eight stations and it has been adopted into the new standard of foul pump station design for Heathrow. We look forward to what the future brings, as larger Flygt Concertor products are released into the range, which will give us further energy and maintenance benefits, as well as reliability.”
Since running the first Flygt Concertor prototype in 2013, Xylem has received valuable feedback from its global customer base, including Heathrow Airport. This has enabled the Flygt Concertor development team to continually evolve the technology and new models are currently in development.
