The Shard, London is an architecturally striking vertical city accommodating a blend of retail, business offices, hotel rooms, residential apartments, restaurants and a public viewing gallery providing an impressive view of the city. It is acknowledged as the tallest building in Europe, the spectacular skyscraper stands 310 meters tall and was inaugurated on July 05, 2012.

One of the key design outlines of the Resilience Scheme was replacement of the existing three sets of pumps serving the zones of Brent Knoll, Draycott and Cheddar Cliffs avoiding the need for a new pumping station building. The key objective for replacing the existing pumps and motors was to improve operational efficiencies during normal operating conditions.

There are many pump manufacturers who can offer equipment designed to the various locally applicable fire rules and regulations. However, SPP is one of the select few who have had their sprinkler and wet riser pumps subjected to the stringent performance and reliability tests of specialist fire approval laboratories worldwide.

The European Sprinkler regulations do not allow the use of pressure reducing valves due to their unreliability – therefore zones are created to limit the pressure on the sprinkler heads in lieu of the valves and this concept has never been applied to a building over 300m before. SPP worked with the fire-safety consultancy Arup to create a solution that produced quality, reliable water sources that satisfied the challenging regulations.

For the sprinkler pumps, SPP supplied 2 of CD12K (Multi-Stage Multi-Outlet, MSMO) 10 stage pumps with 7 take off outlets to supply 7 sprinkler zones in the building. The pumps are driven by 200 kW motors. Each zone has its own jockey pump to maintain the pressure. These MSMO pumps eliminated the need for water storage tanks on intermediate floors, thus reducing the loading on the building and thereby delivering significantly on cost, power and space saving.

The pumps for the hydrants posed a very different challenge. Three pump stations were installed at various levels in the building. At the base level, SPP supplied 2 BU06 split case pumps with 315kW motors to produce 4500 L/M at 24 Bar. The mid and high-level pump houses were equipped with CD10K 4 stage pumps with 132kW motors producing 3000 L/M at 24bar.