“Second, the device offers significantly reduced head-loss, which could enable ‘fine tuning’ in pressure optimisation. Finally, because of its light-weight design and the reduced need for maintenance, it could help us to significantly reduce our carbon output, a goal that is increasingly important to us, given our business aim of reducing embodied carbon by 60% by 2020.”
Boyle adds: “So far, we’ve been impressed. It performs well under a range of conditions and the ease of installation encourages our field technicians to adopt the technology. Testing is still ongoing, but we certainly think this device could have multiple applications in the water industry.”
Tony Hanks, water technologies innovation manager at Morrison Utility Services, adds: “The costs are comparable to many other devices on the market, and yet it offers so many additional benefits. For example, it is significantly easier to install and offers a maintenance free-schedule of up to 15 years. And because it weighs 4kg rather than 30kg, there are a lot of health and safety and cost benefits.
“Personally, I’ve been very impressed. The fact that the device is drawn from aviation technology is impressive and it’s great to see a really revolutionary new design that isn’t just a tweak or variation on existing models. There’s already been significant interest in the UK water market and I anticipate that eventually the use of the Oxford PRVs will simply be business as usual for many water and gas companies in the utilities sector.”
Professor Tom Povey is the technical director of Oxford Flow.
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