Future of Air Cooled Centrifugal Chillers

Air cooled centrifugal chillers have been an interesting development. 

Now some perspective. This is not a brand new concept in the last few years. 

Turbocor is the leading magnetic bearing compressor and brought the mag bearing tech to the mainstream.

Turbocor has been a very popular retrofit option for over a decade. 

One of the retrofit applications has been on air cooled chillers. 

We are seeing the manufacturers adopt this into their equipment lineup as EOM packages. 

A centrifugal compressor is the most efficient compressor tech we have. 

It is amazing how we can use centrifugal principles to get the results we do. 

There is the issue of lift though. 

Lift is an issue for standard water cooled applications where we have far more control of condenser conditions. 

Applying this to an air cooled application with significantly higher lift requirements has been the roadblock. 

The industry has developed better ways of managing high lift conditions but adding mag bearings remove oil management from the equation.

This has tipped the scales for air cooled centrifugal being a real option for the industry. 

Compressor lift = discharge pressure - suction pressure

Using condenser pressure and evaporator pressure is typically what we have available and close enough. 

High lift = surge, this equals no work long.

Oil adds to the lift issue because it reduces heat exchange causing higher condenser pressure. 

This conversation gets much more complex from here. 

In short, we are at a tipping point for this becoming more common in the field. 

MTT

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