A New England Food company approached Thermal Products, Scott Robinson and our partner Advantage Engineering to assist them in designing a new process cooling system to cool a new low protein food being manufactured and then packaged.
At first review the (3) process cooling loads were deemed to be in the neighborhood of 100 tons total, depending on product batch temperatures. The initial design fell well above the customers budget for this project and forced us to review other avenues.
During the site visit, Thermal Product’s Scott Robinson, noted that the incoming city water temperature was within a temperature range to handle two of the three processes and recommended using the city water to send to the existing Plate and Frame heat exchangers that were isolating the cooling water from the process food, affording Thermal Products and Advantage Engineering to offer a revised proposal to handle 80% less cooling load. This not only reduces the capital costs of the chiller, substantially, but also lowered the operating costs significantly from what was originally thought.
Scott determined the remaining third process, did require 6.5 gpm of 36°F cooling water to be supplied prompting a revised proposal for a 20 Ton Advantage Engineering Air Cooled Chiller Model OACS-20 with a close approach Plate and Frame exchanger, again to isolate a 30% Propylene Glycol and Water mixture from water heading to an existing heat exchanger with process food on the other side. Scott needed to “de-rate” the chiller to the 9.75 ton load thereby needing 20 tons. The industry design standard for chillers has been a base design of 50°F chilled water temperature @ 95°F ambient temperature. When a lower cooling temperature is required, as Scott did in this application, a higher nominal ton capacity is needed to reach 36°F. The final chiller included some of the equipment below.
• Air Cooled Condensed R407c refrigerant circuit
• Scroll compressors with hot gas bypass capacity control
• Crankcase heater for cold start-ups
• Discharge check valve
• Brazed Plate Heat Exchanger as the evaporator
• 3HP process pump
• NEMA 4 Control Cabinet
• Advantage Proprietary MI Microprocessor control instrument
• Plate and Frame Heat Exchanger, shipped loose for installation indoors
Thermal Products was able to further assist our customer’s tight delivery needs by doing a small customization of a stock chiller in order to have the chiller onsite in Massachusetts in 1 week from order.
The next step Scott says is to consider storing the approximately 10,000 gallons of elevated hot discharge water used daily by trimming those BTU’s off in one large insulated poly tank.
“I have a design in the works to recirculate and cool daily water by preventing it from costly one time use then down the drain”.
“Q3 and Q4 is the timeframe to look at this”
Please look for the follow-up article to wrap-up this application! Please contact Scott Robinson or any of the Thermal Products team to discuss your application
Scott has been with Thermal Products for over 7 years, but has more than 30 years’ experience in the HVAC and refrigeration industries, an easy shift to our line of heat transfer and related industrial products. Scott is an ASHRAE member and retains numerous state trade licenses. Scott is responsible for the New England trade areas.
