Urban redevelopment plays a major role in the growth strategy of today’s cities. The advantages of urban renewal are obvious: substantial savings can be achieved by using modernized, energy-efficient infrastructure, including air conditioning and cooling facilities – which draw a significant fraction of energy in modern urban areas. Read more
As global warming potential becomes more of an issue, a growing number of industries and businesses moving toward new refrigerants. One of the best examples is the recent upgrade completed by Kaltra for ArcelorMittal’s hot strip rolling mill cooling in Belgium. Recently, the cooling system was driven by water-cooled chillers charged with large amounts of refrigerant R134a, which is characterized by high GWP value of 1430.
It is well-known that the cooling equipment dominates in energy consumption in commercial buildings. Alongside, electricity prices are increasing around the world, increasing pressure on facility managers to reduce the operating costs incurred by operating chillers. The facility managers at a newly constructed commercial building in Canary Wharf, London, were tasked to build and deploy a central air conditioning system with improved energy efficiency and lifecycle value, and Kaltra was invited to contribute to this task.
The air conditioning chiller supporting the movie theatre building in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, was the original equipment that has reached the end of its service life. To address the recurring maintenance issues associated with air conditioning system, the building owner has decided to replace existing equipment, including the original chillers installed at the roof gantry, with a modern energy-efficient system.
With the expansion of its premises, a large commercial centre located in Marseille needed to increase the capacity of its chilled water plant to meet the growing demand for chilled water production. Opened in 2014, Les Terrasses du Port occupies the area of more than 60,000 square meters and is a home to around 200 stores, restaurants, and food courts.
Several concerns including inefficient energy use and growing maintenance costs initiated the need for a chiller replacement at Business Park Vienna, Austria. Having been installed for a long period, and being one of the largest energy consumers in a multi-story building, the existing air-cooled chiller did not operate efficiently under part load conditions such as non-business hours air-conditioning.
Following the initial installation of process cooling system at the GP2Z industrial area in 2016, Kaltra continues to extend the facility and adds new equipment to increase its overall capacity to 5MW cooling.
Initially equipped with air-cooled Lightstream series chillers, GP2Z chilled water production plant will be supplemented with high-reliable units based on screw compressors. Kaltra will integrate new equipment with existing automation system implemented during the first stage of the project.
Significant attention is currently being paid to improving building energy efficiency and reducing of environmental impact, as required by the recent European directives. In commercial and industrial buildings, a significant part of the energy demand is related to air conditioning systems.
The infrastructure of the newly inaugurated hospital in Mulhouse includes central air conditioning system which provides the cooling and heating to the building, as required. The heat rejection of the system is performed by high-efficient dry coolers with a total capacity of 2000kW, installed outside. Given the limited installation space and tight noise rejection requirements, Kaltra offered a compact solution based on Mistral dry coolers with the bottom to top airflow. Year-round operation of the air conditioning system is supported by a glycol-based coolant.
Over time, increasing power density and growing number of installed servers had increased the heat load on Telecity data center cooling system which operates on a 24/7 basis 365 days on the year. Existing fixed-speed chillers installed during the building’s construction could not meet the cooling demand and provide the necessary redundancy Telecity required. As a result, the cooling system needed to be upgraded to keep pace with the data center’s growth.
