All About Our Absorption Chiller Services

Air Comfort offers many cooling and heating solutions, including absorption chiller installation and maintenance. This can help large commercial spaces in your facility stay cool, while efficiently reducing your energy usage with its use of chilled water. Absorption chillers are ideal for commercial and industrial facilities that need year-round space cooling for process operations. These facilities include hospitals, manufacturing plants, research labs, and data centers. If your facility falls into one of those categories or operates in one of those industries, our absorption chiller solutions could help make your facility more energy efficient.

How Do Absorption Chillers Work?

Commercial and industrial absorption chillers can help provide air conditioning, refrigeration, or process fluid cooling to spaces in their facilities. They use a heat source to push a hot water solution toward changing from a liquid to a gas. Then the hot water solution flows through the chiller’s pipes, where it cools. Once the water chills, it’s sent out to cool a certain space and absorb the heat from its equipment.

Chillers often use a solution water as a refrigerant and lithium bromide as an absorbent for cooling temperatures of 40°F or higher. It uses an ammonia (refrigerant) and water (absorbent) solution for temperatures lower than 40°F.

Single Stage Chiller Operations

Single effect or single stage absorption chillers are often fueled by hot water, around 200-240°F, or low pressure steam, around 15 psig. In a single stage chiller, a thermal compressor heats the generator to create the refrigerant/absorbent solution (such as water/lithium bromide). When the refrigerant vapor bonds with the absorbent fluid, it moves to the generator, where it boils the refrigerant vapor and sends it to the condenser, where it turns into a liquid refrigerant. Then the refrigerant cycle starts over. Meanwhile, the generator sends the absorbent to the chiller’s absorber, where it bonds with the refrigerant vapor again. This absorption process generates heat, so the chiller is equipped with a cooling tower to take on the process’s excess heat loads.

Two Stage Chiller Operations

Double effect or two stage absorption chillers require hotter water are fueled by high pressure steam, around 115 psig, or they are exhaust-fired because they require hotter water (around 350°F) than single stage chillers do. A two stage chiller uses the same basic absorption cycle as a single stage chiller, but it’s more complex and can produce more energy capacity from a high temperature heat source. However, two stage chillers are often more expensive than their single stage counterparts.

Commercial and industrial absorption chillers can help provide air conditioning, refrigeration, or process fluid cooling to spaces in their facilities. They use a heat source to push a hot water solution toward changing from a liquid to a gas (steam). Then the hot water solution travels through the chiller’s pipes, where it cools. Once the water chills, it’s sent out to cool a certain space and absorb the heat from its equipment.

Absorption Chiller Designs

If your facility needs an absorption chiller, our Air Comfort engineers can design one for you. We can design chillers of any size, and the size we use for your design is customized for the chiller’s application within your facility. For example, you’ll need a different sized chiller to cool a university’s research lab than you will to cool a data center filled with IT hardware.

Additionally, we will use cogeneration to optimize your chiller’s water temperature. This process improves your absorption chiller’s efficiency curve so it can heat and cool water quickly and efficiently, while also dealing with wasted heat through the cooling tower.

Overall, we want to design a commercial absorption chiller that fits your facility’s needs. We consult with you throughout the process to ensure the chiller cools the appropriate areas in efficient ways.

Develop Your Absorption Chiller With Us

If you’re interested in using a water- or steam-powered absorption chiller to cool your facility, reach out to us today. We’re here to design, build, and install this and other customized heating and cooling solutions for your facility. Your facility needs to stay cool during your commercial operations or industrial processes, and our absorption chiller solutions can help you do that.