Chiller Plants
Chiller plants are commonly used for air conditioning in large commercial and industrial facilities. In manufacturing applications, they also play an important role in process cooling. Chiller plants offer a high cooling output and have a much higher efficiency than unitary air conditioners.
Due to their large scale, chiller plants involve a significant upfront investment. Therefore, it is important to make sure they are properly designed.
When deploying chiller plants, the best recommendation is implementing energy efficiency from the start. Upgrading an existing installation is more complex than simply installing a top-performance chiller plant from the start, and you can achieve significant cooling savings.
How Do Chiller Plants Work?
Instead of cooling the air directly, chiller plants use cool water to remove heat from indoor spaces. In simple terms, chillers are larger versions of air conditioning condensers, with cooling capacities often reaching several hundred tons of refrigeration.
- As mentioned above, chiller plants cool large amounts of water instead of cooling the air directly.
- A pumping system distributes chilled water throughout the building, and the piping used for this purpose is called hydronic piping.
- Chilled water is delivered to cooling coils in air-handling units, where fans blow air through the coil to reduce its temperature.
- Air handlers distribute cooled air throughout indoor spaces.
- The temperature of chilled water increases as it captures building heat, and it returns to the chiller plant to be cooled again.
Hydronic piping requires less space than air ducts, since water can hold more heat than air in a given volume. As a result, a chiller plant design can achieve significant space savings in a large building. Pumping water to upper floors is also easier than blowing cool air vertically, which makes chiller plants an excellent option for high-rise constructions.
There is a wide range of chiller plant configurations available, where the common feature is that all use chilled water to remove heat from a building. Chiller plants are typically described based on the compressors they use, and how they release building heat outdoors.
