Heathrow ‘investigate underground runway heating’ !
15.04.11
Heathrow Airport is looking into underground heating as a way of keeping its runways free of ice after last winter’s chaos, the Telegraph reports. Apparently not a late April Fool, it is based on an interview in Building Magazine !
The airport was crippled for five days due to the cold weather just before last Christmas, with 4,000 flights cancelled and thousands of passengers holiday plans ruined. BAA has pledged to invest £50m at Heathrow to try to avoid further problems, and is reported to be looking into adopting geothermal technology that stores the heat gathered from the ground during the summer. This is then used in the winter to keep the runways and stands from freezing.
Steven Morgan, BAA’s capital projects director, told Building Magazine: ‘It was not the snow that caused problems last year, it was ice. We are working on a plan to capture geothermal energy from the surface of the tarmac, so free energy without using the grid, during the summer, that will then provide a heating capability so the stands do not freeze in the winter.'
‘We would store the energy underground and use it to gently heat water that would then be run through pipes in freezing conditions to warm the stands, which are the slabs of concrete directly beneath the planes, to just above zero.’ The plans are still in their early stages – with similar technology already used by Scandinavian and some UK homeowners to heat and cool their houses.
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