Dixie Contractor
This article is reprinted from Dixie Contractor magazine
The Air Curtain of Pinellas
How one Florida county is using high technology to protect the environment.
Pinellas County, situated on the west coast of Florida, is a vacation mecca for large numbers of tourist visiting the St. Petersburg/Clearwater/Tarpon Springs area. The county operates a first-class network of 16 widely varied and beautiful public parks, and those parks attracted a record-setting attendance of 13,252,107 visitors for the fiscal year ended last Sept. 30.
With park attendance growing every year, the Pinellas County Park Department has an ongoing program of developing existing parks to keep pace with such increased utilization. The county also owns land for the future development of an additional six parks. Over-all, Pinellas County now owns 3,111.5 acres of developed and underdeveloped parklands.
A consequence of park development is the problem of disposing of combustible debris (stumps, limbs, brush, etc.) in an environmentally sound and cost effective manner. Open burning is prohibited in Pinellas County, so the choices consist of having the waste hauled to the county landfill, chipping it, or incinerating it with an air curtain. For Ed Lucas, the engineer in charge of park development for Pinellas County, the use of an air curtain has proved to be highly effective.
Lucas has made use of air curtains on a rental basis for the past four years to dispose of park development debris. About six months ago, the Pinellas County Park Department purchased its own air curtain, a model CP2000 Air Curtain Destructor, manufactured by Concept Products Corp. Lucas made a point of stating that their new air curtain is not used for leaf burning: rather,it is intended for heavy-duty incineration.
Lucas must obtain a permit every time he uses an air air curtain,and those permits are not issued during periods of drought in Pinellas County. Lucas schedules the burns so there is no impact on the public use of the park.
Dixie Contractor recently visited Fred H. Howard Park in northern Pinellas County, where Ed Lucas and his crew were using their new Air Curtain Destructor to incinerate stumps and other heavy combustible debris. A 3/4-ton crew cab truck transports the highly portable, self-contained, high temperature incinerator.
The heart of the CP2000 is its massive centrifugal fan, capable of generating in excess of 100 mile-per-hour winds and air volumes exceeding 20,000 cubic feet per minute. That lets it lay down an invisible air curtain above burn pits to seal in air pollutants. This air injection process creates heat intensity in the 2,000 to 2,500 degree Fahrenheit range. That, according to the manufacturer, results in a burn rate six times faster than normal.
Powered by a 3 cylinder, air-cooled, 33 horsepower diesel engine, the CP2000 operates an entire 10-hour shift on just one tank of fuel. That is an economical rate of less than 1.3 gallons an hour. Lucas feels the power is more than adequate for the CP2000.
The burn pits excavated by Lucas and his crew are usually 10 ft. wide, 20 ft. long, and 8 ft. deep. A Komatsu WA350 wheel loader is used to feed the burn pit from stockpiled debris. The material is reduced to less than 1 percent of its original bulk in the burning process, and Lucas said production totals about 50 to 60 tons in a 10-hour shift for his two man crew.
Considering the Solid Waste Management Department of Pinellas County charges approximately $28 a ton to haul material to the land fill, a gross savings of up to $1,680 a shift is realized. Also, valuable landfill space is conserved.
The success enjoyed by the Pinellas County Park Department in utilizing an air curtain to effectively help deal with growing concerns over waste and air quality gives encouragement to others facing similar environmental problems.
-Don Hamrick