Johnson Controls has advised Jaguar Land Rover on matters relating to the service, maintenance and repair of the Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning & Refrigeration (HVAC&R) systems installed at the Gaydon Centre for almost 20 years. In 2012 we were invited to submit a proposal for replacement of the evaporator installed in the Climatic Wind Tunnel. In a ‘Site Survey Report’ submitted to Jaguar Land Rover, we drew their attention to the key factors that we believed were behind the evaporator’s less then optimum level of performance. The bulk of these stemmed from the fact that the existing evaporator was over 20 years old and throughout its working life a number of design changes had been made to the overall system that it formed a part of, thus rendering it no longer fit for purpose. Examples of such key factors included: • The old evaporator’s level of performance was now too ‘industrial’. It was capable of operating within a temperature range of -40°C and +55°C, while projected requirements were for a temperature range of between -10°C and +50°C. • Our concerns were raised over the suitability of the existing heat transfer fluid being used, which was proving to be highly corrosive. • The old evaporator was still operating on the soon to be banned R22 refrigerant. The use of all HCFCs for the service and maintenance of HVAC&R systems will become a criminal offence from 1st January 2015.

The existing chiller had proved unreliable over the previous 3 years of operation with frequent refrigerant leaks resulting in ineffective air-conditioning for the building.

The building was equipped with four end-of-life Trane water cooled chillers, located in the basement. Johnson Controls installed four York water cooled centrifugal chillers with unit mounted variable speed drives and a total installed cooling capacity of 6,8 MW. Each chiller has a capacity of 1,6 MW (variable to 1.9MW depending upon condenser water temperatures). Johnson Controls needed to design the equipment in such way that it would fit the dimensional constraints of the existing plant area and plant access route but also the specific performance requirements of the client. Morgan Stanley required the chiller plant to match the building load profile, turn down to match the low load requirement when needed and provide an improvement in the Energy Efficiency Ratio across the entire operating range. Other requirements were a reduction in the chiller noise level to improve the working environment in the plant room and a wide operating envelope coupled with intelligent controls to allow possible variation in both flow rate and temperature. The latter was needed to leverage increased capacity from a reduced number of machines during the different installation phases and allow future enhancement to a variable primary flow system.

Ericsson required a new chiller solution to replace the three outdated Trane chillers that supplied the data centre’s cooling. For the new retrofit, the company needed a solution with tangible results, high reliability, as well as a centralized support and no downtime during the project.