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Quotes - Engineering - SalesREFRIGERANT DUTY
Condensers
The piping is the thing most often got wrong. Refrigerant gas enters the upper left connection and condensate leaves the lower left. Reversed, the pack floods and capacity disappears with no mechanical fault to find.
On B-series frames the outer circuit is ports F1 to F4 and the inner circuit F2 to F3. On the cross-flow frames the arrangement differs, so check rather than assume.
Most condenser selections stop at the condensing duty. That leaves value on the table.
Subcooling is the cheapest efficiency in the circuit
Subcooling the liquid before expansion lowers the vapor quality entering the evaporator. Less flash gas means more of the evaporator surface is doing useful boiling rather than transporting vapor that is already vapor.
The compressor also does less work per unit of cooling, because the refrigerant arriving at the evaporator carries more cooling capacity per kilogram. Nothing else in the circuit gives that for the price of a few extra plates.
It is worth sizing for deliberately rather than taking whatever the selection happens to produce. Tell us the subcooling you want and we will price the plates it takes.
- Subcooling is cheap capacity. - Extra plates at the bottom of the pack buy evaporator capacity for no compressor work.
Sizing This Duty
For a condenser, give the refrigerant, the heat to be rejected, the condensing temperature and any subcooling wanted, then the water or glycol flow and its temperatures in and out. We come back with the frame, the plates, the pressure class and a quote.
Request a condensers quoteBefore You Specify
Head pressure climbs and measured subcooling climbs with it. That pairing is the signature: liquid is standing in the lower part of the pack, covering plate surface that should be condensing, so the condenser behaves like a smaller one.
The usual causes are outside the exchanger - a liquid line that rises straight off the outlet, a receiver that cannot accept the condensate, or an overcharged circuit. The unit must also stand vertical, because a condenser laid on its side cannot drain by gravity at all. Check the liquid line routing before blaming the plate count.
Up to a point. More plates tighten the approach and lower the water-side pressure drop, which is why a few extra are cheap insurance on the design day.
The cost shows up elsewhere. Every added channel is refrigerant volume, which counts against the charge on a flammable refrigerant, and at part load the gas is spread over more channels at lower velocity, so the film drains less cleanly. On a machine that spends most of its hours unloaded, give us the minimum load as well as the design duty and we will pick a plate count that works at both ends.
The full designation from the nameplate, not just the frame. Plate type, plate count, pass arrangement, material code, pressure class and the connections in port order all change what gets built, and a trailing T matters: a B25T and a B25 are physically different plates. The Model Number Guide shows how the string breaks down.
Then find out why it failed. A unit split by freezing, or cracked by water hammer or pulsation, will fail again as a like-for-like replacement unless the cause is fixed in the same visit.
A strainer, a way to clean in place, and a material check. A brazed pack cannot be opened, so tower water that carries debris or scale has to be kept out with a strainer and removed by circulating cleaner through isolation valves fitted at installation.
Chlorinated or brackish cooling water pits 316 plates; that is the case for the MC code, SMO 254 plates. And on a reversible heat pump the condenser becomes the evaporator in the other mode, so the same pack needs freeze protection even though it is a condenser on the drawing.
Frames for This Duty
SERIES • 75 TO 200 GPM
SWEP B220
296 plates in a 524 x 202 mm envelope - high surface density for the footprint.
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