Page 2 - About Alan

In 1949 Lovegreen was promoted onto the scientific staff which meant far less hours and more time to study. At the same time he moved to Hydraulics Research Organisation to work under Sir Claude Inglis to set up a design office. When HRO moved to the new Oxfordshire Station in 1951 and became HRS Lovegreen established and managed the building services operation. In return Sir Claude gave him a day a week for thinking. It was Sir Claude who told Lovegreen to go and build a machine to classify sand for Sir Claude’s work on Meandering Rivers when shipping the right stuff from the Indian sub continent proved too expensive. Sir Claude also suggested that writing to newspapers could often bring useful results and so began a lifelong interest.

On April 19th 1952 a daughter Ann Megan was born to Valerie and Alan.

The machine to aim for to produce the correct sands would be an elutriator from the Greek to classify sands by rising currents. In the 1950’s Alan Lovegreen invented the Continuous Discharge Elutriator and took the classification of sands by elutriation from a 5 gram single shot sample to a 15 tonnes a day continuous process. He also devised machines to make wood sand, used the elutriator to polish ground anthracite to use that as sand because these organic materials moved very fast in river models and saved years of time. Lovegreen also designed a new kind of rubber tyred road train vehicle where the last truck passed over the tracks in the road of the first one in a train to within an inch. He also devised a way of dissolving lorry loads of salt very fast. The thinking time paid off.

During the summer of 1957 Lovegreen undertook an attempt to deposit silt in a concrete flume. Sir Claude said that there had been many attempts by scientists and now it was Lovegreen’s turn to try common sense. The experiment was wholly successful largely because enough materials were bought to imitate a river in flood carrying a high load of silt. By designing a flat bottomed hydro cyclone to select only silt and clay from quarry waste, getting the ground conditions with regard to drainage right then setting up the kind of spurs people along the Indus have used for centuries, Lovegreen did the job by commonsense as planned but used the science of what was going on to explain it all. Apart from the silt grains being a different shape the earth that was formed was structurally the same as material from the berms of the Indus canal systems. This work led to Lovegreen re-defining rivers and irrigation canals. The first as a drain in which the soil particles in the saturated earth in which they flow may be defined as having a positive interstitial pressure and that in the case of the canal that pressure is negative. And therefore using canals as a way of determining what may happen in a river was not wise. The two water ways are in fact as near opposite to one another as it is possible to get. Not good news for some.

Between 1959 and 1962 at weekends and evenings Lovegreen built himself a Georgian House in the Town centre of Wallingford. This activity gave Lovegreen a good opportunity to practice and display all the skills he had been taught and it enabled him to help his apprentices and junior scientific staff to expand their knowledge and make some extra money.

Late in 1963 now aged 41 with 24 years pensionable service behind him, following the granting of a Licence to build the elutriators from NRDC to Floatex Separations Ltd. Lovegreen left the Scientific Civil Service, lost his pension and joined Floatex Separations as their production manager. There followed a series of elutriators dealing with sands at flow rates of 20 tonnes per hour up to 150 tonnes per hour.

After a two years Lovegreen was asked to become a consultant to the Company but he decided to breakaway so in 1966 Lovegreen set up his own business then designed built and commissioned an elutriator to produce very high quality foundry sands for Dr Slater of Siminco Ltd.

In 1967 Lovegreen was asked to join the directors of Neldco Processes Ltd in a partnership to design for the parent company, Lovegreen designed and built for the St Ives Sand and Gravel Company a three stage elutriator to produce several 60,000 tonne lots of filter sands for use in the Metropolitan Water Works. Similar sands were also dried, bagged and sold world wide.

In 1967 again with Neldco Processes Limited, Lovegreen designed and built an elutriator de-watering belt combination to classify and dewater sand containing iron ore and followed that with a heavy medium plant to concentrate the iron ore grains for the Harefield Company at Thrapston.

Late in 1967 the partnership was dissolved because his colleagues desired to move into processing waste coal but Lovegreen sensed it was unwise and friends in the industry advised him to keep clear at all costs. These were the correct moves. The coal project was a disaster from day one and following the real coal tip disaster at Aberfan not far away, the entire site was bulldozed flat for safety reasons.

So Lovegreen set up in business on his own again and was soon busy. In 1969 having solved some problems for Geoffrey Folley of the Folley Group the two men formed the Harleyford Hydrosand Equipment Company based at the family estate to market Lovegreen inventions and know how, but this time with good financial backing and all the facilities that would be needed.

In 1969 Laporte Industries Ltd. heard about the set up and for them Lovegreen designed, built and commissioned a complete elutriator based crushing, dewatering and conveyor plant to size and transfer and dewater 85% of the UK’s Fluorspar needs for steel making. That machinery ran for at least 29 years

From 1970 onwards Lovegreen developed new forms of sand classification machines to start fresh procedures. The first in a steelworks accepted scalding hot slag fragments in boiling water to be cooled and dewatered by means of his dewatering conveyor belting. Typically another plant was a quay based fully integrated dredgings acceptance plant to classify, wash and de-water sand and gravel dredgings at Totnes in Devon where Harleyford had the dredging contract.

Or, for example, to take a competitors completely new plant that did not work at all and gradually day by day get it to go by redesign, reshape, cut out this and weld that, until a disaster became a hundred tonne an hour success.

In 1970 while on board an aircraft bound for Pakistan and over Italy at 33,000 feet Lovegreen saw that the starboard wing skin was tearing between rivets. Agreement was reached with BOAC, the manufacturers and the aircrew to put down at Cairo in the middle of the second Arab-Israeli war and deal with the problem by tracing the crack and drilling a stress relieving hole at the end of it. This was done and the aircraft took off and continued on its way to Karachi

Lovegreen’s journey up the Indus by local aircraft and road brought him to the Tarbela Dam Joint Venture Project on the Upper Indus River to ascertain why the crushed rock fill was changing grade between production and delivery and to get the matter sorted out. A million tonnes had been moved into place before the trouble was spotted. Where the fast running conveyors changed direction the cargo was fired at railway lines on high vertical steel plates to make it drop vertically onto the next run. Lovegreen saw the set up as one half of a huge toggle crusher and immediately realised that the rail lines needed covering with old truck tyres sections to soften the blows and save the degradation. Lovegreen was given every assistance. A laboratory was set up and a series of tests made and answers obtained. On site staff were made aware, changes to practices made, a dewatering conveyor built on site, the plant modified and project re-started.

In 1972 Lovegreen designed and built Harleyford Boat Lift for use at base, only to find that a rogue company had been in and photographed the machine at work and then started to sell the machine as their own at the Boat Show. A different kind of showdown took place and no other lifts like that one were built because the machine brought in trade for a sister company. The lift could take a boat out of the water and move it ashore or put it in again at the rate of one every half an hour. In those days at £40 a go. Lovegreen last inspected the machine in its fourteenth year and it was earning well.

In 1974 while acting as a consultant to Mr. Jusuf Al Ghanim of Kuwait, Lovegreen recommended bringing overland road trains from Australia to Kuwait. David Towell one of Lovegreen’s chosen engineers, ex Rolls Royce, ex Floatex went to Australia with Kataba Al Ghanin to bring the first tractor and trailer set back. The project was a success but thereafter the outfits were made in Kuwait at the Al Ghanim works using General Motors components. The Arab-Israeli War made it difficult to sell the British Leyland engined tugs to Arabs. You win some and you lose some.

From 1969 to 1989 the company produced a variety of rotating belt sludge dewatering machines for the effluent industries, culminating in a series of GRP bodied machines being sold World Wide, mainly in the USA and Ireland by Irishmen but by Lovegreen via agents to Venezuela, Malaysia, Australia, Holland, Denmark, South Africa and Norway, these machines were copied all over America and sold as being designed and built in the USA but not before lots of them had gone out from the UK. The American brochures made interesting reading and were certainly well done. The Americans even kept to the UK colour schemes!

From 1969 to 1989 Lovegreen invented and produced a series of cavitation aerators to transfer air to water and then created a range of new machines to use the method, again mainly in the UK, USA and Ireland but also by direct sales to Venezuela, Hong Kong and Australia. A typical use was to process tannery effluent in tanks ashore instead of shipping the waste 200 miles out to sea.

In 1967 privately, with friend and next door neighbour Mr. Ray Thomas, Lovegreen started a move to bridge the River Thames close to Wallingford, Oxon. Within days the Wallingford Society was formed with about 300 members to drive the scheme forward. Fourteen years later the Cholsey Bridge was built just outside Wallingford where it now forms part of the Wallingford by-pass and the Town of Wallingford was saved from internal arterial roads and the loss of its valued open spaces, the Bull and Kine Crofts that had been unspoilt for over a thousand years.

In 1976 as a hobby and to help Mr. Graham Bedwell of the BBC, Lovegreen as licenced Radio operator G4FLX started to make audio recordings of journals for blind radio operators, something he still does. In this year having flown all over the place on commercial flights Lovegreen restarted flying as a pilot to see how he would get on. Everything went very well and he enjoyed being among flying people again.

Towards the end of 1989 Lovegreen officially retired.

In 1999 Alan re-started the leading edge technical audio magazine QTI. The magazine which goes out on CDs is now edited by Kelvin Marsh who gathers its material from New Scientist and similar papers from all over the world.

From 2001 until the present time Alan has been a 24 hour carer for his wife Valerie who has Alzheimer’s disease and who has broken all her limbs and cracked her pelvis. This means that Alan has to keep his wife under almost total observation to avoid accidents, but by means of his computer, telephone and radio transmitter he can still be effective outside the confines of their home. He has six hours and ten minutes off duty every week for doing jobs outside their house such as mowing the lawns or walking the dog. What you might call a full life. The thinking is done in the middle of the night a habit formed during the watches at sea.

Starting in May 2006 Mr. Lovegreen, now in his 85th year resumed his active trouble shooting life and has been devoting as much time as can be found to take a fresh look at how we might generate electrical energy from the wind. See the web page links to see how he got on and if you can join in and see what we can all do as one big design team that is self replicating.

Go to www.thelovegreenschool.co.uk

Good luck, enjoy yourselves, have a good life and one day happily reflect on it!