Case Studies
Evaporative Cooling
CMP Products – Evaporative cooling solution
About the Client:
CMP Products design and manufacture cable glands, connectors and accessories for industrial, marine and explosive atmosphere installations. They manufacture cable glands which are available to suit a range of applications, covering a variety of international wiring codes, and with a wide selection of approvals.
Project Background:
The factory of approximately 70,000 sq. ft. consists of three working areas. Two of the areas have a number of CNC machines which produce a considerable amount of heat; even when a factory has general extract systems in place, a lot of process machines still produce a considerable amount of heat in the working environment. Cooling has become a major requirement within well-insulated and air-sealed modern buildings, and CMP’s building was no exception to this.
Project Solution
Evaporative cooling is an extremely efficient and effective way to provide cooling to large areas and has proved to be successful in this application. We designed and installed an evaporative cooling system to provide cooling to the two areas. The system comprises of ten evaporative cooling units to supply cool air to the factory area together with a balanced extract system to discharge the hot air into the atmosphere.
Evaporative cooling operates as a balanced supply and extract system with a relatively high volume of air being passed through the building when there is a cooling demand. At times when the outside air temperature is high, the relative humidity of this air will always be low. By increasing the humidity of hot dry incoming air as it passes through the wetted pads of the cooling unit, the latent heat of evaporation will reduce the temperature of this air to a more comfortable level. When the external temperature rises, the relative humidity will naturally reduce and therefore provide a greater cooling effect. The combination of the high volume of the extracted air to remove the heat gains and a high volume of incoming cooled air will provide much more comfortable working conditions.
The temperature and humidity of the internal air are continually monitored to control the volume of the incoming air via the variable fan speed. It can also be pre-set to switch off when not required. Each evaporative cooling unit can provide in the region of 35kW of cooling at a consumption of only 2kW of electrical power. This system would therefore provide in the region of up to 350kW of cooling when required for only approximately 20kW of power consumption.
Project Result:
Now that the evaporative cooling system has been fitted, the temperature in the working area can be cooled when needed, and can be kept at a much more comfortable level — and this can all be achieved while keeping running costs low.