On 28 May 2019, the winners of the German Innovation Award were honoured for the second time at a festive gala in the Technology Museum in Berlin. More than 350 invited guests from business, politics and the media accepted the exclusive invitation. The innovation prize is awarded by the German Design Council, which was founded in 1953 on the initiative of the German Bundestag.
One of the winners of the evening was Flottweg. The company from Vilsbiburg convinced with its industrial centrifuge Xelletor and was awarded the German Innovation Award in Gold in the category „Excellence in Business to Business – Machines & Engineering“.
In their search for maximum separation efficiency, Flottweg engineers and technicians repeatedly radically questioned the company‘s existing centrifuge concept. Inspired by the lightweight construction of high-performance sports cars and motorcycles, the idea of a novel centrifuge design was born. The heart, rotor and decanter screw, was developed from scratch. The Xelletor system takes centrifugal sludge dewatering in sewage treatment plants to a new level of evolution. The result is a screw without a screw body.
„The dewatering of sewage sludge is standard in the operation of sewage treatment plants. Since the sludge usually has to be removed, the operators have an interest in separating as much water as possible from the sludge in order to save weight and thus reduce costs. The disposal of sewage sludge alone accounts for up to 80% of operating costs. With the Flottweg Xelletor system, a specially designed high-performance centrifuge, additional sludge savings of up to 10% can be achieved and energy consumption reduced by up to 34%. Such increased performance in the mechanical separation process with significantly lower consumption has redefined the standards in the field of industrial centrifuges,“ according to the jury of the German Innovation Award.
