WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT:
Thanks for joining us today. It’s our first kickoff webinar of 2020, So, thanks for joining Advanced Cooling Technologies. I’m excited, I think you have a good webinar in-store today.
So, I’ll hand it over to a couple of stars in the HVAC energy recovery area, but first to get you started and orient you with what we’ll be covering today.
The two gentlemen who’ll be given the presentation are Mark Stevens and Devin Pellicone. Mark has been with ACT for over 10 years. He’s been a catalyst in getting us started in this industry and has a lot of experience with these products and the logistics associated with getting these fulfilled into new construction projects; working with engineering firms to get these designed in.
And then Devin is our lead engineer. And he has been a leader in all technologies Pumped and Passive Two Phase. So he is very familiar with not only our HVAC product line but also a lot of our Industrial Products that feature those type of technologies, so you’re in good hands today and I expect they will give you a good presentation.
And just one more side before I pass it over to Mark, I just wanted to say that we’re doing this event really because of the AHR award, our innovations award that we were given late in 2020.
And we’re kind of disappointed that we couldn’t go to AHR Live in 2021 and see all our friends, and accept the award there. But we have been getting a lot of questions on these pumped systems, so to answer all your questions, we thought it’d be best to host this type of webinar, and we do want it as interactively as possible. So please type in questions, and we will do a Q&A at the end.
And also, we are going to be doing a lot more content on the HVAC energy recovery line and a lot of other diverse thermal solutions. So please follow us on LinkedIn, or your social media of choice, and join our e-mail list. We promise that will have a lot of very good, informative educational content throughout the year.
So, without further ado, I’ll hand it over to Mark and Devin. Thank you.
2:57
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks, Bryan, for that intro. That was great.
So, as we get started, we’re going to do an overview: heat pipes, HVAC, AAHX, case studies, and the pump-assisted split loop systems.
In the HVAC market area that we’re talking about today, we’re going to be talking about energy recovery, but mainly in the air to air heat exchanger area.
We also wanted to mention that we have a newer line that’s been growing pretty well, which is electronic enclosure coolers that are completely sealed.
So, if you’re interested in those, you can contact us and we’ll talk about those as well with you.
5:23
The first thing I’d like to talk about is that the main thing that makes these products work in the HVAC space is the heat pipe, which is a copper envelope and inside of that is a working fluid.
For HVAC applications, the working fluid happens to be R134 a refrigerant. And these devices are thermosiphons so that we usually must have the hot air stream lower than the cold airstream because these systems are gravity aided. So, this is the heart of all of the different heat exchangers that we make, whether it’s a wrap-around or an air-to-air system.
So, what happens on one end is that the hot airstream takes the refrigerant, turns it into a vapor that flows along the pipe; it begins condensing in the colder air stream, travels back as a liquid.
And this two-phase process makes a standard heat pipe about a thousand times better thermal conductor than copper. So, you can imagine a standard refrigeration coil with up to sometimes 500 of these tubes in there. Each one of those tubes has a potential capacity of 500 watts.
You can turn that into BTU’s so that’s thousands of BTUs as well. And there, you can actually see the gas going from a gas to a liquid inside of the heat pipe.
6:58
So, heat pipes supply the HVAC systems. We have a number of different approaches. We have what we call our Wrap-around system to where you have 100% outside air. The first heat exchanger coil is what we call our pre cool coil. which wraps around the cooling coil. And then we exchange heat on the other side. So, as the hot air comes into the facility on this pre-cool side, the refrigerant boils so we’re taking away heat. Now the cooling coil doesn’t have to work as hard.
And then with air conditioners, who would know that you have to actually reheat the air to bring it into a nice, dry neutral for the space?
We can do these systems in either a pipe to pipe, or we’re going to also be talking about split loop systems today as well, where they can be separated by some tens of feet if needed.
In this case, the wraparound instead of having individual pipes, there is a liquid line on the bottom and a vapor line on the bottom for each row, where you’d have multiple tubes per row, now you just have a single liquid line and vapor line.
And then the coils actually flow vertically instead of classic coils which flow horizontally. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that when we get through it.
8:19
But today’s focus is on the air to air and energy recovery systems. So, again, we can have systems that are next to one another, and those would be pipe to pipe. And there’s always an incoming and an exhaust stream and their always counter flow because that helps the effectiveness level.
So, you can get more heat transfer when you’re counter flow, or we can go with this split loop system, Again, where we can be some tens of feet apart or close together but at different levels
The nice part about the split loop systems is it does offer us an opportunity to turn the actual energy recovery off by simply putting a valve in here. And we’ll show you some of those applications coming up.
We work with our customers in three different ways:
We can do retrofits in the field.
Sometimes our representatives out there have air handlers, and so what they’ll do is they’ll send them the air handler. And we will do the factory install here and then send it off to the site.
Or, if you are working with a specific air handler manufacturer, we have experience sending our units to be integrated at the OEM.
9:44
Here’s why we’re considered green energy: essentially these devices work completely passively in most applications, and there’s less energy consumption since they’re doing it all passively between the hot air stream and the cold airstreams are transferring that energy passively through the heat pipes.
We also optimize energy recovery because these days it is necessary; in trying to make your building a healthy building, most ASHRAE Standards require an increase in the number of air exchanges per hour.
So, as you’re doing that, your energy costs are going up, but you’re also keeping the people inside the building healthy, whether it’s a hospital, a lab, a school, a work building.
So, by having our type of energy recovery, you can capture that heat or that cool air leaving the building and do either pre-cooling or pre-heating, even though you’re required to do more air exchanges. So that’s really helpful in this day and age, as we’re trying to keep everybody healthy within a building.
10:45
So let’s talk about pipe-to-pipe and split loop air-to-air systems.
The nice part about these systems is as large as you can build a standard refrigeration coil or one of our vertical split loop coils, you can build a system.
So you can have units as little as 10000 CFM or 100,000 or 200,000 CFM if you can fit it into a building. Really, everything is designed to fit your custom needs. And, again, as long as you have a coil that can be built to that size, we can engineer and make a system.
And the beauty of our systems is that there’s no cross-contamination. So, between the Exhaust air stream and the exiting air stream, you don’t have any potential crossing between whatever air is leaving the building and that coming into the building.
So, that is one really nice feature about heat pipe heat exchangers; they also help meet a lot of the requirements in the ASHRAE Standard 62 to 2010 for ventilation and Acceptable Indoor Air Quality. And a lot of that has to do with air exchanges as I’ve mentioned earlier.
11:55
So, what’s the difference between the pipe to pipe and the split loop? Well, your standard pipe to pipe systems are here on the bottom. And when you specify a pipe to pipe system, we already pre-tilt the units. So, even though the casings may be completely level, the inside configuration is at a slight tilt so you’re hot Airstream.
Flow always has to be lower than your cold air stream if it’s reversed, the system doesn’t operate.
You can also put them in a vertical situation so that the hot air stream again needs to be on the bottom, but when Devin Pelican comes up and he talks about these systems, we can do a pumped version of this. So now you can use a vertical unit in both summer and winter where this non pumped version would have to be specific to the season.
12:45
And sometimes you might have a rooftop where you would like to use these. So, if you have air handlers sitting on top of this, you can do pre-cooling or pre-heating, depending upon how you set the system up.
The nice part about the split loop thermosyphon is that they are season-independent.
So, if you have a hot air stream coming in this right-hand unit and now it’s wintertime, and you have a cold air stream and a reverse, because they’re split loupe they start a thermosyphon pump. So, the liquid refrigerant automatically reverses by season, which is a big advantage.
The other big advantage, there is 100% isolation between the incoming air stream and the exhaust air stream. So, if you’re in a pathogen lab, whatever is happening over here, can’t possibly get to the other side. Or if you’re in a hospital environment or something like a nursing home, or those types of things, these are all very beneficial systems. Even if you’re in the correctional facilities, a lot of those types of facilities have issues with a lot of communicable diseases, so you want to try to keep as much fresh air and isolation between airstreams as possible.
contact us for full transcript: solutions@1-act.com.