Air-cooled scroll chillers are used in a wide variety of applications across various industries, like plastic finishing, concrete batching, metal finishing, and more. Their secret? They are highly reliable, versatile, and enable precise temperature control.
Their ability to safeguard production quality and improve process efficiency has put them at the corner store of industrial cooling. No wonder air-cooled chillers are a go-to choice of several industrialists for their cooling needs.
In this article, we are going to learn all about air-cooled scroll chillers, including how they operate, their advantages, their applications, what to look for when buying them, and more.
What are Air-Cooled Scroll Chillers?
As the name suggests, air-cooled scroll chillers use a scroll compressor to achieve the desired cooling effect. These are versatile and more efficient than traditional chillers.
Most of these achieve temperatures in the range of 4℃ to 25℃. That makes them an ideal choice for numerous cooling applications, like meat storage, breweries, galvanizing, etc.
To truly understand how air-cooled scroll chillers work, you must know about their refrigeration cycle. The cycle involves four main processes: evaporation, compression, condensation, and expansion.
What does each of these processes entail? Let’s discuss that in detail.
- Evaporation
This is the first process of the cycle. Here, a low boiling point refrigerant is used to cool the desired environment. Mostly, HFC-134a or R410A refrigerants are used in air-cooled scroll chillers.
This liquid refrigerant is passed through an evaporator coil in the container that needs to be cooled. It absorbs heat from its surroundings and turns from liquid to gas. The evaporation of refrigerant takes place, which cools the desired area.
- Compression
In this process, the vaporized refrigerant is moved to a compressor. These chillers use a scroll compressor. This has two spiral-shaped scrolls, one stationary and the other rotating. Now, why do you require two spirals?
One spiral remains in its position while the other rotates and moves towards it with the refrigerant between them. This causes the refrigerant to compress. Its pressure and temperature increase. This makes it more susceptible to further cooling.
- Condensation
In this process, the compressed refrigerant is brought into a condenser coil. For air-cooled chillers, the condenser is mostly located outside the building, where it comes in direct contact with the ambient air.
The heat from the refrigerant is transferred to the air, which then gets released into the environment. This causes the refrigerant to cool down and condense, i.e., turn from gas to liquid.
- Expansion
This is the last process in the refrigeration cycle. The condensed refrigerant is taken to an expansion valve. Here, its temperature and pressure are drastically decreased. What does that do?
It generates a two-phase system in the refrigerant. A part of it is liquid, and a part is transferred to the gaseous state. The gaseous state is more susceptible to absorbing heat, making the entire refrigerant more effective in absorbing heat in the next cycle.
Applications of Air-Cooled Scroll Chillers
As discussed earlier, air-cooled scroll chillers have a wide variety of applications. Let’s look at a few of those.
- Plastic Processing: These chilling systems are ideal for plastic processes such as extrusion, injection molding, blow molding, and recycling. Their precise control over temperature ensures that high-quality plastic products are manufactured with minimum defects.
- Medical Equipment Cooling: In the medical field, precision and accuracy matter a lot because a slight change in temperature can affect the effectiveness of medicines. These chillers give exactly precise cooling and are thus a great option for maintaining the cooling of medicines and medical equipment like MRI machines.
- Food & Beverage Processing: Food and Beverage industries have very strict guidelines for maintaining the quality and safety of foods and drinks by storing them at the right temperature. A slight change in temperature can destroy the entire batch. That’s why industries like bakeries, fish processing, oil refineries, meat processing, breweries, carbonated soft drinks, etc., use air-cooled scroll chillers.
- Industrial Processes & Metal Finishing: Several industrial processes, including metal finishing, generate a lot of heat. Stable cooling systems are required to manufacture quality products. Hence, these chillers are used for galvanizing, oil cooling, critical machine and machine tool cooling.
- Concrete Batching & Customization: Ready Mix Concrete (RMC) plants produce customized concrete based on the requirements of the individual contractors. Each of these concrete has different recipes and thus evolves different amounts of heat. An air-cooled scroll chiller can maintain a range of temperatures, which can be easily changed. That makes it a perfect choice for concrete batching.
Advantages of Air-Cooled Scroll Chillers
Are you still wondering whether an air-cooled scroll chiller is the right choice for you? If yes, you need to go through their detailed advantages to get rid of your confusion.
These are just some of the top benefits of using these chillers in multiple industries.
- Energy efficiency
These chillers use ambient air from the atmosphere to remove heat from the refrigerant. This totally eliminates the need for a secondary cooling system for the refrigerant.
Thus, less energy is utilized in these chillers than in traditional ones. That’s why air-cooled chillers are more energy efficient.
- Environmentally friendly
Since they use less energy and don’t release greenhouse gases during the cooling process, they are extremely environmentally friendly.
They increase the surrounding temperature, but that’s less harmful than the impact of the greenhouse gases and how they trap heat by virtue of their Global Warming Potential.
- Compact design
Air-cooled scroll chillers are smaller in size than most other cooling systems. All the components are integrated into a single sturdy frame, which makes them very compact.
This also makes the installation process easier.
- Low maintenance requirements
These chillers have minimum maintenance requirements. That not only decreases the maintenance costs but also their downtime.Decreased downtime automatically translates to a more efficient cooling process.
Conclusion
Air-cooled scroll chillers operate on minimum energy and give precise results. They are able to maintain a wide range of temperatures. And their output is always stable.
That is why multiple industries, including food and beverages, metal processing, medical, concreting, and more, use these cooling systems for various applications. Their high reliability makes them an excellent choice for several applications.
