Cooling of industrial processes

Industry

For a large number of industries like automotive, building materials, plastics and rubber to chemical, metal processing and pharmaceutical – process cooling is key to ensuring production stability and product quality. The cooling processes are extremely diverse, covering hydronic and mould cooling to product tempering.

Significant energy is needed for constant process cooling which often accounts for a large share of the operation expenses. Continually rising costs of raw materials and primary energy thus make economical and Efficient Energy consumption a central factor in production line cooling.

More and more companies have to rethink and adapt their previous cooling concepts with traditional climate-damaging refrigerants according to the stricter energy efficiency and climate criteria.

The main requirements for industrial process cooling are:

  • Year-round availability
  • High operational safety
  • Energy efficiency
  • Optimal operating parameters e.g. chilled water supply temperature
  • Environmentally friendly generation and disposal
  • Extendible, scalable cooling capacity
  • Observance of special factory standards
  • Predictive maintenance and service

The eChiller fulfills all these requirements and has already demonstrated this on numerous industrial applications.

Besides the environmental and economic benefits that the eChiller already offers by using water (R718) as its refrigerant, the following points also make it ideally suited to cooling industrial processes, in particular.

Benefits of the eChiller cooling industrial processes:

  • No environmentally harmful substances in the refrigeration cycle
  • Modularity for adaptive cooling capacity as production grows
  • Highly efficient in applications with fluctuating cooling requirements
  • Temperature regulation in 0.1 K steps
  • Predictive maintenance and service (link: predictive maintenance)
  • Refrigeration generated close to production (no need for installation in a separate machine room)

A large share of industrial processes works with chilled water temperatures of 15 °C and higher. At these temperatures, the eChiller’s fully-adjustable free cooling mode works with outstanding energetic efficiency, thus enabling cost-effective production of chilled water. In average years, these conditions are fulfilled up to 70 per cent of the year, thereby requiring operation of the eChiller’s modules only during transition periods and on warm days. In contrast to conventional chillers with integrated free cooling, the eChiller’s FreeCooling+ mode additionally allows rejecting process heat to ambient at temperatures almost similar to those of the chilled water.