I'm anxiously awaiting the full release of this product. Read on:
A trusted source from Trane's CenTraVac product management just informed me that Trane is going to release a “low lift” centrifugal chiller option in the next few months.
"The chiller will retain all the advantages of Trane’s centrifugal chiller, direct drive, semi hermetic, low operating pressure, but its efficiency sweet spot will be focused on warm leaving chilled water set points. In other words, data centers with warm chilled water design utilizing 65 or 70 degree F (18.3-21.1 C) water".
Unless you've been living under a rock, technical publications since 2005 from ASHRAE, LBNL, The Greengrid, and a multitude of white papers have been discussing sensible cooling environments and elevated chilled water temperatures and the positive effects on increased number of hours of free cooling.
The difficult part is the implementation of the sensible cooling loop on the ground. Without going into the thermodynamics of condenser and evaporator head pressures, Comfort Cooling water cooled chillers just aren't built to handle higher leaving evaporator chilled water temperatures (LCHWT).
So this new Trane chiller is essentially a redesign of an industrial comfort cooling chiller to adapt to process cooling type machines.
This is wonderful news for data center environments as it translates directly to significant energy savings. As I said, I'm anxiously awaiting the full release!
Thanks for sharing this. At my work, we just had process cooling done for our buildings because we are going to need the additional cooling. It's already been really hot this week so it definitely has been a good investment.
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