Hi Justin,
I’ve worked at two different sites that both had air cooled compressors.
One of the sites had the air-cooled compressor in an internal closet in the
building. That was nice because the system never became clogged with dirt
or detritus but, if either the inlet air to that closet or the outlet air
was lost then it would cause the system to shut down due to overheating. Due
to fire regulations the closet had to have an airtight seal and no
ventilation was allowed through the door. Given that constraint, even when
only the outlet air from that closet was lost it would cause the inlet air
to stop flowing. If I was notified that they were working on something
with the building ventilation I was generally able to keep that door open
for a short period of time and bridge through those outages.
At my current site we have an outdoor air-cooled compressor. The
compressor requires regular maintenance over the summer months and it gets
so bad at times that it can’t go more than three days without it
significantly fouling with cottonwood seeds. Our location really creates a
significant issue because we are right along a river which is lined with
cottonwood trees. At times over the summer it looks like it’s been snowing
when you look into corners around buildings because so much cottonwood
accumulates there. I did fabricate an external cage for the compressor
with wood and household window screening which pre-filters the air through
a much larger surface area and with that I can easily make it for about 10
days even in the worst of the cottonwood seeding time.
Additionally, they did a mill-in-place resurfacing of the road which is
behind our building and I did not catch the fact that that created a
tremendous amount of dust because I was away for the event and didn’t see
how bad the dust was when they were working out there. The grit was hard
to see since it had ended up internally trapped in the fins. The event led
to an unexpected shutdown of the system.
We do not have access to chilled water at this site. An additional issue
here in Idaho is that we routinely exceed 105 F during a few weeks in the
summer and I think that is very near to the external compressors design
limit for this application.
I would definitely go with the water-cooled system if I had the option. I
would be very careful to make sure that the water is clean as so many other
folks have stated. I would try to incorporate a way that I could have a
backup which could carry me through water chilled water outages. Be
careful with the plumbing of the system, I know of an MRI installation
where dissimilar metals were used in the plumbing of the chiller and
galvanic corrosion ended up clogging part of the inlet.
Regards,
Joe
*******************************
Joe Dumais, Ph.D.
Associate Research Professor/Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopist
Boise State University
College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
1910 University Drive, Boise, Idaho 83725-1520
(208) 426 4913
http://chemistry.boisestate.edu/
*******************************
Sent from my MS Windows PC
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Received on Fri Mar 01 2024 - 15:41:42 MST