Are process chillers useful?

Process chillers put simply provide cooling for processes or applications in certain industries. Industrial chillers often have process cooling methods to help them with the applications they’re running. Process chillers are composed of a compressor, condenser, evaporator, pipes, high pressure refrigerant relief valves and pumps. They are designed to stand the roughest environments and toughest conditions there is. These chillers take away heat and supply a consistent desired temperature throughout the day or the entire processing time. With this, the efficiency of the processes is improved.

Here are some of the industries that use process chillers:

Printing Industry- Process chillers are used to control the temperature in presses and rollers which results in efficiency and quality with lower costs because there’s lesser stretching and bleeding upon printing.

Baking – Process water chillers are used in the mixing process because the chilled water from the chiller allows longer mixing times and thus improves the final quality of the ingredients being mixed.

Plastic Production – Process chillers are used in regulating temperatures during injection molding and blow molding.

Food – Process chillers are used to cool processes like vegetable processing, confectionery making and chocolate manufacturing.

These are only some of the industries that use process chillers. A lot more out there are turning to these things to take advantage of its benefits. These industries include, but not limited to, boat and airplane manufacturing, skating rinks, dry cleaners, chemical industries, pharmaceutical industries and metal finishers. Process chillers have proven to be beneficial and industries will continue to use them.

How efficient are air cooled chillers?

For some of us who have air conditioning chillers at home or industrial chillers in the offices, there are questions waiting to be answered. Only a few of us know how they truly work and there’s one thing that boggles the mind. When it comes to air cooled chillers, energy efficiency has become an ambiguous term.

Air cooled chillers remove heat from water or other fluids. This heat is then dispersed into air through a system called refrigeration.

It all starts when a fluid is forced with high pressure through a tube. This changes the fluid to turn into gas which absorbs heat through the evaporator heat exchanger. This gas then travels to the compressor where it is compressed into a hot gas before being pumped to the condenser. In the condenser, the gas is passed through small copper tubes with thin aluminum fins bonded to them. When ambient air is forced through the condenser via the process chiller’s fans, the gas is condensed back to a liquid state. In this process, the heat that the gas has collected is released through the chiller fans as well. The liquid is sent back to the tubes so that the whole process can start again.

The efficiency of an air cooled chiller depends on the efficiency of the chiller compressor. This can be measured through COP or Coefficient of Performance. A COP is the ratio of heat removed to the electrical input required. In chiller efficiency, the higher the COP is, the more energy efficient it is. If a COP is 5, it means that for every 1 KW of electrical energy input, 5 KW of heat is removed. If a COP is 10, it means that for every 8 KW of electrical energy input, 8KW of heat energy is removed.

Check out the COP of the chiller the next time you’re out chiller shopping. You can now tell the difference in terms of energy efficiency.

How Refrigerators work then and now

Process Chillers may come as a foreign term to many of you. This is because it is often only used formally. There are different types of chillers out there and the most common of all is one item that is essential to our everyday living: the refrigerator.

The refrigerator is an air cooled chiller that allows us to chill or freeze things to lengthen their shelf life. But refrigerators back then and now did not follow the same process. 

REFRIGERATORS (then):

At the back of a refrigerator, there’s a long thin tube that goes in loop. This tube is connected to the pump powered by an electric motor. Inside this tube is Freon which is a type of gas but is also known chemically as Chloro-Floro-Carbon or better known as CFC. CFC’s start out in liquid form and are pumped through the coils in the freezer area. Here, the liquid turns to gas and when it does, it absorbs some of the heat that’s in the freezer compartment. This is the reason why air cooled chiller’s freezers are super cold and filled with ice all around especially for used chillers that haven’t been cleaned. The pump sucks the CFC gas and passes it through the thinner pipes located outside the refrigerator and compresses it. The process of compression turns the gas back into liquid form and heat is given off. This is the reason why it’s hot when you stand next to your refrigerator. They cycle continues inside this process chiller.

REFRIGERATORS (now):

Because CFC’s were harmful to the atmosphere if they leak out of refrigerators, manufacturers had to find a way to do away with it. Hence, modern day air cooled chillers use HFC chemically known as tetrafluoroethane. This type of gas turns to liquid if it is cooled to -15.9 degrees Fahrenheit. The process all starts with a motor and compressor that squeezes the HFC and gas heats up. As it cools, HFC turns to liquid. The liquid then flows through a tiny hole called the expansion valve. There is a low-pressure are between the valve and the compressor because the compressor is pulling ammonia gas out of that area. When HFC gets to this area, it vaporizes and turns to gas. The coils go through the freezer and the colder liquid in them pulls heat out of the compartments, leaving freezers super cold. The compressor then sucks up the cold gas and the cycle continues.

Refrigerators in the earlier days are different from how refrigerators work nowadays. The difference may be subtle but the overall effect is huge.