Process cooling specialist, IsoCool, has been awarded one of the highest accolades in the cooling industry, having won the coveted ‘Industrial & Commercial Project of the Year’ award at this year’s RAC Cooling Industry Awards. IsoCool fought off extremely tough competition in a category that included entries from refrigeration, air conditioning and process cooling companies, across both commercial and industrial markets. The prestigious event, which identifies and rewards the ‘finest the industry has to offer’, saw almost 700 refrigeration and cooling professionals gather at the London Hilton Park Lane on the 25th September.
The RAC Awards’ demanding entry process required IsoCool to submit a project that demonstrated environmental benefits, carbon saving, return on investment, improved performance, and the use of repeatable innovative methods and technologies. Having plenty of such projects to choose from, IsoCool decided to highlight a recently completed installation, an innovative energy-saving process cooling solution for Longbenton-based injection moulder, Northumbria Blow Mouldings (NBM).
The innovative methods which IsoCool employed on this project included the separation of the hydraulic system from existing chillers, the replacement of beside the press chillers with a centralised chiller system for the moulds (utilising two of the existing chillers which were suitable for centralisation), and the installation of an adiabatic cooler on the hydraulics to provide up to 100% direct air cooling. IsoCool also installed an IsoFC high-efficiency heat exchanger to the system, which uses surplus capacity from the adiabatic cooler during low ambient conditions to pre-cool water returning from the mould circuits before it reaches the refrigeration plant.
Thanks to IsoCool, NBM is on target to save over £80,000 a year on cooling costs, is enjoying significantly improved plant performance – such as an increase in output on the twin head machine from 1,100 to 1,400 bottles per hour – and the cooling system is due to operate on 100% free-cooling for more than 2,000 hours annually. In addition, the installed electrical power of the new cooling system is approx. 60% less than that of the previous system, resulting in massive carbon savings each year. What’s more, as entirely repeatable techniques, IsoCool’s work with NBM demonstrates how thousands of companies with similar ‘traditional’ cooling system arrangements could benefit from significant energy savings and incredibly short ROIs.
The team at IsoCool sends a big congratulations to all of the other winners at this year’s RAC Awards, and look forward to developing many more award-winning cooling solutions for years to come.
