Cooler for Water-Cooled and Absorption Chillers

EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE COOLING FOR CHILLERS

Chillers provide chilled water on a massive number of applications, from general process cooling and commercial air conditioning systems to climate control of critical applications such as data centres.

Refrigerant is used to absorb heat from these systems and dissipate it via a condenser. Sometimes the condenser is air cooled by fans mounted on the chiller that vent the heat into the atmosphere.

However, either for efficiency purposes, or often due to the chiller being located where venting the heat to atmosphere is not possible (a basement or plant room), a water cooled chiller is required.

Standard electric vapour compression or absorption chillers pass the heat from the refrigerant to a condenser water loop via a heat exchanger or absorber. At this point an air blast cooler or adiabatic cooler can be positioned outdoors to dissipate the heat.

Water cooled absorption chillers are an environmentally friendly way of providing chilled water where a waste heat source at circa. 90°C is available (e.g. water outlet temperature from a gas or diesel fired generating set jacket water circuit or industrial grade hydrogen fuel cell) but often need much lower condenser water temperatures of approximately 30°C.

Transtherm are specialists at supplying air blast coolers and adiabatic coolers for this type of application. These are regularly coupled to Transtherm pump sets and control systems to take complete responsibility of the condenser water cooling loop.

Utilising Transtherm’s advanced control systems, the air blast cooler can be used to offload the chiller and provide chilled water temperatures direct onto the process system in the cooler months of the year, thereby reducing system energy usage. This is a process called Free Cooling. The Transtherm control system can monitor external ambient conditions and system water temperatures to give Free Cooling whenever possible. Signals can be provided to a site BMSs so that valves on the system can direct the water flow from the condenser water loop to the chilled water loop.