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Benefits and applications of evaporative cooling systems in hotel complexes
The principle of evaporative cooling, applied among others in cooling towers and evaporative condensers, plays an important role in modern industry, in general, and in the hospitality industry, in particular. Its greatest application occurs in refrigeration and air conditioning refrigeration installations.
The optimization of energy saving processes is a priority for the hospitality sector, especially if one takes into account the weight of it in the Spanish economy. A good part of the energy consumption of these establishments is concentrated in refrigeration and air conditioning refrigeration installations and this is precisely one of the main applications of evaporative cooling.
Applications: air conditioning and food preservation
Cooling towers and evaporative condensers, which use water as a coolant, favor energy savings, besides presenting economic advantages and offering a long useful life, requiring investments lower than those demanded by similar solutions, being respectful with the environment and safe for human health. However, restrictive legislation and unjustified social alarm have seriously damaged these teams in recent years.
The result has been a tendency to decrease its presence in refrigeration facilities for the use of other technologies that, as in the case of aerorefrigerators, are less efficient and increase energy consumption, thus challenging energy efficiency policies which are recommended by national and international organizations.
However, the hospitality industry can be highly benefited thanks to its advantages related to energy efficiency, especially in two aspects:
– Food preservation: industrial refrigeration is used in approximately two thirds of the food industry facilities. In the case of the hotel sector, it is a factor to be borne in mind in the bars and restaurants of the complexes, to the extent that energy optimization is favored in food preservation. This is longer as soon as possible to reduce its temperature to optimal storage levels. The conservation of meat, fish, fruits, vegetables and dairy products, among others, is ensured by means of low temperatures.
– The air conditioning: it is one of the main applications of evaporative cooling. Both for its application and for its design the evaporative cooling equipment saves energy. First, lower water cooling temperatures ensure optimal process performance and reduce energy consumption; Secondly, the equipment is highly energy efficient due to the use of latent heat transfer of evaporation.
Secure systems
The fact that these equipments are considered as risky facilities when disseminating the Legionella bacterium has fostered a negative perception of this technology, which, together with the scarce support from the authorities and the ignorance of society, have caused that decision-making on the installation of refrigeration systems in hotels has often opted for less energy efficient alternatives.
At the same time, there is the paradox that many resorts have spas and installed vaporizers in summer terraces. It is, in both cases, risky facilities very close to the public, and therefore dangerous, if extreme precautions are not taken with their cleaning and maintenance.
But the truth is that for an outbreak of Legionellosis associated with a cooling tower to occur there must be an unlikely chain of events: the existence of a high concentration of bacteria colonies, which enter the facility through the public network of supply, and uncontrolled conditions that allow its multiplication, that is, the discharge of a current of air with aerosols contaminated to the environment and a sufficient number of micro-drops of aerosols inhaled by people susceptible to suffer the disease (immunosuppressed).
These circumstances rarely occur and, in addition, to prevent the risk of Legionellosis it is enough to break this chain of events in any of its links, which is easy to break with only establishing a good design and a proper maintenance of the cooling facilities, with the treatment of water as one of the fundamental pillars of the program. In this way, it is possible to minimize the dragging of water aerosols in the air discharge of the equipment, to avoid the possibilities of inhalation by means of the suitable location of the equipment and to eliminate the conditions that favor the multiplication of bacteria.
Technical advances
The efficiency of these systems does not stop increasing and the hospitality industry is one of the sectors that benefits from the constant technical evolution of the evaporative cooling systems during the last years.
The improvements have been implemented both in order to avoid the proliferation of bacteria, especially Legionella Pneumophila, and in order to optimize the energy efficiency of the cooling towers, which are recognized among the most efficient equipment in air conditioning.
In the first case, we talk about the evolution in the design of the equipment, with safety tools such as droplet separators that prevent the diffusion of water droplets large enough to carry the bacteria at a long distance; the mandatory use of biological maintenance programs; and the taking of other precautions provided for in the legislation (Real Decreto 865/2003, of July 4, which establishes the hygienic-sanitary criteria for the prevention and control of legionellosis), such as the distancing of equipment from zones of passage of people, they favor that the possibility of the proliferation and, in his case, the dissemination to the environment of the bacterium is practically null. All these are aspects to be taken into account when taking on the design and construction of a hotel complex.
On the other hand, a series of improvements have been made aimed at optimizing the energy performance of the equipment. Among the latter, the high efficiency motors, which respond to the IE 2 and IE 3 standards and offer a very high performance. Frequency converters that allow the regulation and control of equipment operation contribute to this, so that the energy demand is exactly adjusted to the consumption and maintenance needs. The result is an operation of the “a la carte” tower with the consequent energy optimization.
Mention, finally, that one of the great advantages of these systems, in general, is the scarce water footprint left. This environmental indicator (HH) evaluates the total volume of fresh water used in the production of goods and services, an element to be taken into account in the evaluation of the economic cost of any product.
Conclusions
The refrigeration with refrigeration machines of mechanical compression with condensation with water, cooled with evaporative equipment, constitutes a market in constant growth at European and world level, both in terms of the number of facilities (currently there are more than five hundred thousand with evaporative cooling in Europe), as in the number of companies supplying such equipment.
The use of evaporative cooling is also supported by a major manufacturing industry, which chose this technology in almost all applications that have to dissipate heat and has shown concern about the restrictions imposed on these equipment and that endanger the progress responsible industrial
We can conclude that the use of evaporative cooling to cool the condensation water of the refrigeration facilities (cooling and air conditioning) is a highly efficient and economical technology for saving energy. It is a clean and safe technology with great value as an energy alternative for large sectors of the industry, including the main source of foreign currency and employment in the country, tourism.
Control y Ventilación, S.L. is a company of international renown within the industrial and livestock sector, for being a manufacturer of products within the evaporative cooling sector, such as the HUMIBAT, evaporative plastic cooler; or its NUCLEOS towers, Cooling Towers. In both products, which the substrate in which the evaporative is produced is a plastic honeycomb, a honeycomb resistant to both physical and chemical attacks, and at the same time flexible, is a honeycomb with mesh structure, manufactured in High Density Polyethylene , and marketed under the names of PANAL C & V or if it is a separator of drops, SEPARADOR C & V.
For more information you can see the following links:
www.controlyventilacion.com/refrigeracion-evaporativa/
www.controlyventilacion.com/relleno-y-separador/
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