A Landia Chopper Pump when serviced recently was found to have been chopping on knives apparently left in waste-food.
Chopper pumps are so named because a rotating “blade” and 3 fixed “knives” (scroll down to see illustration) at the pump casing entry point. These are positioned to chop through fibrous material (even cutting through rope at times), to prevent such material getting wound around the pump spindle.
(We guess the best way to explain this is that the same entanglement problem can easily occurs when during Hoovering the floor at home near a shoe-rack. It happens when a dangling shoe-lace gets pulled into the roller-brush at the front! The Hoover has to be stopped and the shoelace pulled out before the Hoover will work again…)
The knife action prevents entanglement causing the pump to shut-down until cleared manually. But, on this occasion the pump design had been effective against the entry of multiple knives.
Hence we are able to say; “Robust Pump Survives Knife Attack”!
Admittedly, you may judge that we have gone a little overboard on this article title, but we found the thought amusing.
Decide for yourself!
All will be revealed, when you read our sponsor’s Press Release below:
Press Release 3 February 2020:
Landia Chopper Pump Disarms Knives at AD Plant
In the 70th Anniversary year of Landia inventing the Chopper Pump, it was thought that the company had probably seen all it was capable of. Their engineer’s thought that few surprises would remain. But, even the company’s most experienced service engineers were recently surprised to discover just how indestructible their pump could be.
While visiting a pump installation at a food-waste-to-energy plant in Essex recently they taken aback to see what the company’s pumps and pasteurisers had coped with.
The unintentional addition of numerous knives in catering waste at this location had given the Landia Chopper Pump a little more to chew on than anticipated. Knives had in fact entered the pump.
Yet despite the considerable challenge, the pump was completely undamaged, restarting immediately after service, which would be well beyond less resilient pumps.
Landia’s Technical Sales Engineer, Howard Burton, said:
“The robust performance of our Chopper Pump is no surprise. All the time they run, they are minimising food waste particle size to help provide good quality AD feedstock. So. it was astonishing to see how it had, on this occasion, effectively worked as a screen, capturing a large quantity of knives”.
He added;
“Back in 1950 when Landia’s Christian Oelgaard invented the Chopper Pump, he created a truly resilient piece of engineering, but I doubt he thought it would be working so effectively on a pasteuriser with knife-infested food waste!”
Designed as a free-standing unit that heat-treats organic waste so that the resulting thin substance can be used as an energy-efficient substrate, each Landia pasteuriser is fitted with a Landia Chopper Pump.
Organic waste is received, liquefied, then heated to 70oC. Held at this temperature for one hour in accordance with animal by-products regulations, the pasteurised material is pumped to the next stage in closed pipes by one highly efficient process.
Tel: 01948 661 200 – Visit: www.landiaworld.com
