There’s never a one size fits all approach to our work. We problem solve to fit around existing space requirements – doing exactly this for two universities for whom we provided completely bespoke cooling solutions.
Working around legacy equipment
Our London commission was for a centrally located college with legacy equipment left on site – redundant coolers which couldn’t be removed. As such, our fans had to fit into the existing, unusual free space left over.
The task was to cool generating sets in the university’s energy centre, so localised energy could be produced on site – but the job specified very low noise levels – something quite challenging because usually the lower the noise required, the bigger the equipment’s footprint tends to have to be.
Despite the restrictive space available for the new installation, we successfully designed a number of air blast coolers on the roof of the college to dissipate heat created from the building’s combined heat & power system, as well as working with their electrical supplier of choice, Allen-Bradley.
Working around the weather
For a project in Scotland at the capital’s university, we designed four large scale adiabatic coolers to cool water from its large absorption chiller system.
The initial design parameters supplied meant that the required coolers would be too large to fit in the allocated space. We set to work so find a suitable solution and provided very in depth justification for our recommendations – by sifting through the weather records for Edinburgh for the last ten years!
Our product dimensions were all based around this meteorological evidence, showing that the adiabatic coolers we suggested would work efficiently whatever the ambient temperature. We went back over the last decade and despite freak heat waves and high mean temperatures, found that nothing would be hot enough to phase our coolers.
Why we did this?
Sizing of adiabatic coolers relies heavily on how much moisture is already present in the air, as the adiabatic process increases the relative humidity. If it’s already high, then there’s little scope to increase it which means the equipment needs to expand in scale.
So we worked out the starting relative humidity for the worst case scenario weather on the very hottest day in Edinburgh, and showed that our equipment would still work.
It meant that we were able to select equipment that fitted the space better and also demonstrated that our coolers were completely fit for purpose.
