Fresh air supply to London’s Heathrow Airport

Fresh air intake supply to London’s Heathrow Airport

London’s Heathrow Airport started out life as a small 150 acre plot purchased from the Vicar of Harmondsworth.

“Heathrow Before World War II Map”. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons –

It now employs 76,000 people within its boundary (equivalent to the population of Guildford) and is sat on 1,227 hectares.

That is 20 times its original size with five terminal buildings covering the land previously occupied by the hamlet of Heathrow, Heathrow House and various farms, orchards and market gardens. It is still defined by its 1950’s hexagram shape and now operates as one of the busiest airports in the world.
The terminal buildings cover 686,064m² and process more than 191,000 passengers on an average of 1,200 flights per day.
In a recent article written by Cordis the author states that up to 50% of the total energy in a typical airport will be spent on HVAC to maintain a suitable environment for passengers and staff.

CASCADE: REDUCING ENERGY USE BY AIRPORTS
Airports are big energy consumers – and that’s before a plane takes off or lands. The daily electricity and thermal energy used by a large airport compares to that of a city of 100,000 people.
This article goes on to quote
“A pilot scheme has been undertaken by two Italian airports, Fiumicino in Rome and Malpensa in Milan, used by 55 million people a year.
The project engineers concentrated on the large air conditioning units, chiller plants and cooling towers at the airports. They found equipment running when it was not needed, incorrect heating and cooling settings, poor positioning of sensors and poor maintenance”.

Heathrow Airport consumes a massive 701GWh per annum which is almost 4 x the annual production of the Glendoe Hydro Scheme. However, HAL do generate a lot of their own energy through various renewable schemes and are continuing to advance that technology in the new Terminal 2.

Terminal 5 is the largest free-standing structure in the UK and the roof area is the size of five football pitches.  It requires a massive 2,500,000m³/hr of air to serve its energy-efficient displacement air-conditioning system.

The air is filtered through three 11m² banks which contain a total of 726 filters.

Even at a highly efficient 15 watts per m³ that will be costing over £4,000.00 per hour or £30 million per year (figures are an estimate only) for this air supply only.

That is why efficient air movement is so critical because face loading on filtration systems will increase the energy demand exponentially.

Although the airport itself contains almost no flora and fauna it is surrounded by open spaces and gardens which create the leaf, seed and pollen debris that is blown across its 1,227 hectares. Add to that tyre rubber from 1,200 flights per day, dust kicked up from the runways and local roads and you can see that the filters have a hard job to do.

New Permatron PreVent® air intake screens are to be installed to protect the existing filter bank and the coil fins on the frontline frost coil.

The added benefit (currently under test) is that the changeover periods for the existing filter bank will be extended by a new washable filter with only a minimal effect on airflow.
Notes:

• CORDIS is the Community Research and Development Information Service
• Click here for the full article by CORDIS
• For more information regarding air intake screens go to www.airintakescreen.co.uk
• Richard Betts is the Managing Director of RAB Specialist Engineers who are the sole UK and European distributor of Permatron Air Intake Filter Screens.