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Concept
Vacuum truck
Summary
A vacuum truck, vacuum tanker, vactor truck, vactor, vac-con truck, vac-con is a tank truck that has a pump and a tank. The pump is designed to pneumatically suck liquids, sludges, slurries, or the like from a location (often underground) into the tank of the truck. The objective is to enable transport of the liquid material via road to another location. Vacuum trucks transport the collected material to a treatment or disposal site, for example a sewage treatment plant.
A common material to be transported is septage (or more broadly: fecal sludge) which is human excreta mixed with water, e.g. from septic tanks and pit latrines. They also transport sewage sludge, industrial liquids, or slurries from animal waste from livestock facilities with pens. Vacuum trucks can also be used to prepare a site for installation or to access underground utilities. These trucks may use compressed air or water to break up the ground safely, without risk of damage, before installation may begin.
Vacuum trucks can be equipped with a high pressure pump if they are used to clean out sewers from sand.
Other names used for vacuum trucks: vacuum tanker, "Sucker truck" (in Australia) or "Sewer Sucker", "Hydro-vac", or "vac-trucks" (in Canada) or "Exhauster truck" (in Rwanda, Malawi). Slang terms include: "honey truck", "honey sucker" (in India and South Africa), and "honeywagon", all (probably) derived from honey bucket.
When a vacuum truck is used to transport fecal sludge then it can also be called "fecal sludge truck".
Commercial vacuum trucks which collect fecal sludge usually have a volume of . However various smaller versions for specialized applications or low-resource settings can be found with tanks as small as .
They generally use a low-volume sliding vane pump or a liquid ring pump to create a negative air pressure. The use of diaphragm mud pumps is less common, but with the advantage of a simpler design and usually lower overall costs. The disadvantage is that mechanical parts come into contact with the sludge, which is not the case for the more common vacuum pumps.
Official source
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