31 January 2024
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Airedale by Modine has completed the delivery of 21 of its largest ever bespoke free cooling chillers, each 22 metres long and housing 36 fans.
The order, for an undisclosed data centre operator, is believed to be one of the largest single colocation orders taken by Airedale in its 50-year history. It consists of 21 of the super-sized chillers, two free cooling DeltaChill chillers (16 fan), 72 AireWall units, 12 SmartCool ONE chilled water downflow units and the Cooling System Optimiser, an on-site building management system (BMS) offering an automated optimisation control package.
The data centre company has partnered with Airedale as part of its drive to meet its sustainability objectives. Working with the client, Airedale’s data centre solutions engineering team has designed a larger derivative of the DeltaChill R32 free-cooling chiller to deliver maximum efficiency to meet on-site cooling demands.
Alongside the 36 high efficiency EC fans are 17 scroll compressors, selected due to their ability to deliver concurrent free cooling, maximising partial and full free cooling availability. The 16-fan variants are said to offer the same efficiencies and acoustic packages have been applied to all chillers to ensure stringent noise constraints are met on site. The units all feature integral harmonic filtration, to increase quality, reliability and energy efficiency, by reducing loss in electrical components and deliver indirect energy savings. On such a large scale, these mitigations deliver tangible savings over the course of a year.
Airedale says one of its key differentiators is the ability to deliver a complete cooling solution, comprising not only high efficiency, free cooling chillers, but also the computer room air handlers (CRAHs), controls packages and on-site project management and installation teams.
The cooling system optimiser and on-site BMS works to deliver a fully automated system at both product and system level, delivering optimal performance in response to conditions at a detail and speed beyond that which a human operator could respond to. Likewise, the control system’s ability to recognise patterns and identify potential issues before they occur adds an extra layer of redundancy to an already robust operation.
Adam Yarrington, Business Unit Director for Data Centres at Airedale, said: “Delivering efficiencies that meet sustainability objectives and help us reduce the impact of mechanical cooling on our planet, is something we care deeply about at Airedale and is something we have continually strived to do, since before legislations around this were introduced.
“Working on a project of this complexity is really exciting for Airedale, as it allows us to demonstrate the scale of our capabilities, deliver meaningful efficiencies and push our technology to deliver more, which is absolutely achievable when taking a whole system approach.''
