In industrial terminology, chillers are machinery used to remove or absorb heat from a liquid via a vapor compression cycle. It is pumped through the equipment in use for the process, to control the cooling of the products and machinery involved in the process. A wide variety of industries need to use these cooling chillers for the purpose of maintaining a regular cooling through the process that generate a lot of heat in the machinery and the surroundings.
There is quite a variety of industrial chillers that are used to serve the purpose. For industrial application a chiller can be a centralized chiller or a decentralized one. A centralized chiller is capable of fulfilling multiple cooling needs, whereas a decentralized chiller, as the name suggests, has a separate chiller for each application or machinery. Some of the popular water chiller alternatives are : water cooled chillers, air cooled chillers and evaporatively cooled chillers. Certain types of extrusion process use chill roll or air cooling chillers.
Plastic extrusion industry is one of the major industries that use water chillers. The main uses of a water chiller or any other form of liquid chiller in the plastic extrusion process are injection &blow molding, welding equipment, die casting, machine tooling, etc. During plastic extrusion, plastic is heated, melted and then extruded through the die. The purpose of using cooling chillers here is the quick solidification of the freeze tech profile shapes and designs.
Two of the frequently used industrial chillers used for cooling requirements in plastic extrusion are centralized water chillers and portable chillers. In this article we take up portable chillers and their efficacy as industrial chillers.
Industrial Portable Chiller
An industrial portable chiller is a cooling system that removes heat from one element and deposits it into the other. It can be used cool the process as well as the process machinery. It consists of complete unit of compressor, evaporator, condenser, process pump and a coolant reservoir. The standard chiller design is a system that will cool water to 45° F and water/glycol to 20° F and then deposit the heat into the ambient air at 95° F or water at 85° F. It is available with both air and water condensing coolers, single and twin model compressors and configurations as per demand for special requirements like low temperatures, hazardous atmosphere and some special applications.
In the plastics industry, a portable chiller is used to cool the hot plastic that is injected, blown, and extruded. It also cools down the extrusion equipment used in creation of plastic products, thus saving on machinery and machinery wear and tear. They are safer for use than centralized chiller; in case a particular part goes kaput, you do not suffer a complete cooling shut down. But it also has a drawback, that its process water flow is limited to 2.4gpm/ton, restricting its range of applications. Things to consider before buying an industrial portable chiller are a complete familiarity with the type of plastic extrusion process being used and the extrusion equipment, to be accurately gauge the pump size and tank size required for cooling.
No comments:
Post a Comment