Coventry & Solihull Waste Disposal Company (CSWDC)

Coventry & Solihull Waste Disposal Company (CSWDC) is an independent waste management company whose primary business is extracting energy (heat and electrical power) from municipal and commercial solid waste.

Based to the south of Coventry, UK the site has been in operation since 1975. The company operations are tightly controlled under UK and EU Regulations and they are licensed to operate by the Environment Agency. They take very seriously the plant’s performance and environmental management in strict compliance with both ISO 14001 and ISO 18001 standards.

CSWDC operate three municipal waste incinerators which were constructed by Head Wrightson in the 1970s and later updated in the 1990s by Babcock. They have the capacity to produce 40 tonnes/hour of wet steam (217°C/423°F) to drive two turbines. All burn twelve tonnes of waste per hour which equates to approximately 260,000 tonnes per annum.

The economiser sections on the three boilers relied on retractable steam soot blowers to try and prevent ash buildup on the tube banks; however, over the years their reliability and performance were worsening along with higher and higher maintenance costs. So in 2010 Paul Taylor, CSWDC Planning Engineer contacted Primasonics after reading about their Acoustic Cleaners on their web site. He then completed and returned their boiler questionnaire together with dimensional drawings of the economiser units for evaluation. PIL engineers visited the site to continue their evaluation of the application and then arranged for Paul along with his senior manager to visit the London Waste site to inspect the Primasonics Acoustic Cleaners installations in their economisers and receive a report from Richard Bland, Mechanical Engineering at London Waste’s five boiler plant. On his return, Paul prepared a report for his Directors recommending proceeding with installing Primasonics Acoustic Cleaners on one of his economisers to replace the steam soot blowers. This work was completed ready for the boiler re-start in February 2011. The results were excellent, so in the following two years, Paul installed further Acoustic Cleaners on the other two economisers – a total of nine Primasonics Acoustic Cleaners. All the steam soot blowers are now redundant and as Pauls says ‘saving the company money on steam usage and breakdown associated with these steam soot blowers’.