Atlas-SSI was awarded a contract to install a new trash rake at the Pentagon Pumping Station, in Washington DC. The unique situation at this site was there was an existing building with very little head room and debris could not be dumped outside of the building. In addition to the custom design of the rake, Atlas-SSI had to design a pedestal dumpster that automatically rotated as a part of the cleaning cycle. This was accomplished by incorporating the unique SmartScreen® technology control system that linked and communicated all of the functions of the cleaning cycle from differential level controls, timers at this unmanned station.
In addition to the small footprint, the equipment had to be built off the floor level because of the frequent flooding due to the changes in tide. On the timer or DP sensors trigger the rake to go into cleaning cycle the dump tray rotates to the back side of the rake, the rake then goes into three preset cleaning cycles. Once the rake makes one pass the rake retracts to the top and rests while the dumpster rotates into place. Once in place the rake dumps the debris and the dumpster rotates to the back side and rake returns to the cleaning cycle and the process repeated. In addition to this process, the rake had two preset depth functions, shallow water clean and full depth clean. This allows the plant to select the optimal setting based on the type of debris coming into the plant. Often the debris is heavy at the water surface so shallow water clean allows the unit to only grab debris at the water leave and two feet below which speeds up the cleaning cycle.
