Four ideas for energy conservation

Water-cooled centrifugal chillers for comfort-cooling applications are generally designed for a set of standard conditions promulgated by the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI). These conditions include a leaving chilled-water temperature (LCHWT) of 44°F and an entering condenser-water temperature (ECWT) of 85°F. But in a process-cooling application, AHRI standard conditions usually don’t apply. The ECWT might remain at 85°F, but the LCHWT might be 65°F or higher.

If it’s to operate efficiently with higher LCHWT, a centrifugal chiller requires certain nonstandard features that might not be present unless specified. To understand their importance, one needs to understand the thermodynamics of “lift” and its relationship to chiller performance. This knowledge facilitates proper chiller selection for process-cooling applications under low-lift conditions.

Understanding lift

Lift (or head pressure) is the difference between condenser refrigerant pressure and the evaporator refrigerant pressure. Using defined pressure/temperature relationships, lift also can be calculated from the LCHWT and the leaving condenser-water temperature. Further, when the LCHWT and condenser-water flow are constant, the ECWT can be used as a proxy for lift. Because most condenser water systems are designed for constant flow, ECWT is the most common metric for lift, and we’ll use it for the purposes of this discussion.

Figure 1. For comfort-cooling, reducing the entering condenser-water temperature leads to lower energy consumption.

In comfort-cooling applications, lower ECWT indicates lower lift, which reduces the compressor work (Figure 1). The relationship can be summarized as: lower ECWT = lower lift = less compressor work = less energy consumption. In comfort-cooling applications, ambient temperatures often allow you to take advantage of an ECWT as low as 50°F (at AHRI conditions).

The ability to use a lower ECWT significantly improves chiller efficiency. In fact, reducing lift achieves greater chiller efficiency gains than can be realized by reducing load. The efficiency improvements from lower lift accrue to both single-chiller and multiple-chiller installations.

Lift in process cooling

In process-cooling applications, LCHWT is the metric associated with lift - higher LCHWT means lower lift (Figure 2). So, for low-lift process-cooling applications, the formula changes slightly. Now, higher LCHWT = lower lift = less compressor work = lower energy consumption.

Figure 2. For process cooling, raising the leaving chilled-water temperature leads to reduced energy consumption.

But the chiller must be designed to take advantage of higher LCHWT if you want to see effective reduction in compressor work. If the unit is designed properly, you’ll also see significant energy savings because efficiency is mostly a function of lift and only slightly affected by load. These efficiency improvements will be seen in both single-chiller and multiple-chiller installations.

Not every chiller can take advantage of conditions when a high LCHWT is specified. Four design variables affect a centrifugal chiller’s ability to handle low-lift conditions in process-cooling applications:

• The drive design
• The orifice design
• The oil-management system
• The compressor’s aerodynamics

Drive design

It’s not intuitively obvious that electric motor design has anything to do with a chiller’s ability to handle low-lift conditions, but it does. Two motor choices for centrifugal chillers are a refrigerant-cooled type (hermetic-drive) and the air-cooled type (open-drive).

A hermetic-drive motor is located inside a refrigerant-filled motor cavity. Unfortunately, this is a bad place for it to be under low-lift conditions. The head pressure on a hermetic-drive motor must always be high enough to ensure an adequate refrigerant flow through the motor cavity. Without sufficient flow, current draw can overheat the motor windings, and a high motor temperature will shut down the chiller. For that reason, chillers with a hermetic-drive motor must maintain a greater pressure differential between the evaporator and the condenser to ensure adequate motor cooling. Artificially limiting the lift reduction is a common way to ensure sufficient pressure differential in hermetic-drive chillers and limiting lift reduction increase the compressor’s energy consumption.

An open-drive motor, on the other hand, is located outside the refrigerant circuit. Therefore, it can be air-cooled or water-cooled. It doesn’t depend on refrigerant flow for cooling and is unaffected by changes in refrigerant flow during low-lift conditions.

Orifice design