University of Bath Sports Village

Background

The Sports Training Village at the University of Bath is a world class multi-discipline training environment and regularly hosts major international competitions such as the Fed Cup Tennis and Modern Pentathlon European Championships.

Purposes

The intervention, carried out together with our English partners Cooltherm, consisted in replacing the existing chiller, with a more compact and at the same time more efficient and performing one. The power of the new chiller had to be calibrated to also serve a new extension to the building which led to an overall increase in required cooling capacity.

Project

The new chiller was designed after monitoring the use of the existing system and collecting useful data from the site energy meters. Thus, it was possible to establish the peak cooling capacity needed to serve the whole building, including the new expansion.

So we designed a 450 kW (128 RT) power air-cooled Turbomiser unit, with two smaller centrifugal oil-free compressors, to ensure the chiller the necessary compactness to adapt to the reserved area on the roof of the building but ensuring a more power and efficiency than the old unit.

In addition, since the University constantly monitors its carbon footprint, the unit has been designed to ensure the best capacity turn down for low load winter operation, as well as to use the HFO-1234ze refrigerant which has the lowest GWP level.

Challenges

The installation presented a twofold challenge: on the one hand, the replacement of the system had to be carried out as quickly as possible so as not to create discomfort for the athletes; on the other, the parking lot was rather narrow and the largest crane that could get into the car park was unable to lift the chiller to its final position. With the help of the specialist lifting contractor Terranova a solution was found by using 2 cranes, the first crane to lift the chiller from the car park into a building well, then a smaller crane which was able to fit in the building well to position the chiller into its final position.

Results

Our Turbomiser allows incredibly low capacity turndown, lowest stable running load is 50kW (ambient dependant) which is perfect for those cold winter days where the load is low. But at the same time, being a machine with two compressors, it can deliver the higher cooling capacity required in the summer months and offers the customer the integrated redundancy of its own chilled water system in a single unit.