Doubling Wealth & Halving Resource Use” (9) --- What is 'Free Cooling'?

Continued from my previous article.

9. ‘Free Cooling’ Prevents Energy Waste in Water Cooling Process

A normal cooling tower is capable of providing water of less than 32℃consistently. However, there are cases when water temperatures of less than 32℃ will be required.

What are our choices then?
In the case where cooling water of 25℃ is required for only some lines.

1) Use a Centralized Chiller to cool all the circulating water in the factory.
In this case, even parts of the factory that don’t require such low water temperatures, will also be fed with the colder water. There might also be cases when the water is too cold, and needs to be heated up. A large quantity of energy is then wasted.

2) Use a closed loop Cooling Tower (like Ecobrid) to cool all circulating water. Add a mini chiller for the lines that require water of less than 25℃. In this case, energy consumption will be significantly less than the case above. However, the mini chiller installed will still cause wasted energy in colder weather. When cooler weather alone is enough to keep water under 25℃, running the chiller consumes power unnecessarily.

3) Free Cooling
To avoid the waste of energy mentioned above, our association proposes the use of cooling towers like the ‘Ecobrid’, an ‘Independent Mini Chiller’ and ‘Free Cooling’ together. In winter or when the temperatures are cool enough, Free Cooling would stop the chiller from operating and feed water cooled by Cooling Towers only.

In other words, the chiller will only operate when water cooled by Cooling Towers is above 25℃.

When using conventional open style Cooling Towers, it is often not advised to use the water directly for the molds. Contaminants, minerals & deposits in the water could lead to problems with the mold. So we strongly recommend ‘Ecobrid’, a closed loop, air-cooled water cooling system. Unlike water quality problems often found in open style Cooling Towers, the Ecobrid maintains high water quality and can be used directly with molds.

For the more details of Ecobird, please refer to the following web pages.
・Solutions for Solving Water Quality Issues
⇒　http://greenmolding.org/english/solution/582

・Solutions for Solving Water Quality Issues (2)
⇒　http://greenmolding.org/english/solution/606

・Brochure of Ecobrid
⇒　http://matsui-mfg.net/product/pdf/ecobrid_201402.pdf

By switching to a closed loop tower (like ‘Ecobrid’), and combining it with an ‘Independent Mini Chiller’ which operates only when needed, more than 50% of the electricity normally consumed can be saved.

We can now provide an independent mini chiller combined with a free cooling function. This product is called the “Microgel (RCD)”.

For more information on “Free Cooling” and the “Microgel RCD”, please refer to the web page below.
⇒　http://matsui-mfg.net/factor4_solutions/leaflet_e/1-7_201310_en.pdf