August 1, 2008—Johnson Controls recently announced it will supply 18 York-branded YK-K7 water-cooled centrifugal chillers to the Bahrain Bay project in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Bahrain Bay is a $2.5 billion, mixed-use iconic development on the Northern waterfront of Manama City, Bahrain. It includes commercial towers, banking headquarters, shopping malls, five star hotels, and residential townships that will cater to more than 25,000 residents.
Johnson Controls sees the project as the beginning of a new trend of using seawater as cooling water for large district cooling plants in the Middle East region. The large chiller order (a record number for the company) comes from Unicorp International Contracting WLL Bahrain, the EPC contractor to Dalkia for Bahrain Bay utilities project. Dalkia is the facilities manager and district cooling service provider for the Bahrain Bay project.
Manufactured at Johnson Controls’ facility in San Antonio, Texas, the chillers will be installed in a counter-flow configuration that will yield an additional six percent gain in efficiency. They will supply about 67,500 gallons per minute of chilled water to the residents of Bahrain Bay at peak.
Johnson Controls says its YORK chillers are high-efficiency chillers that use environmentally friendly, non-ozone-depleting HFC-134a refrigerant and that they will operate at extreme entering condenser water temperatures.
The chillers use titanium tubes, which are highly resistant to both erosion and corrosion, permitting the use of sea water for heat rejection and preventing the consumption of up to 1,300 gallons per minute of sweet water. The use of titanium also facilitates the use of internally enhanced high-performance tubes and permits water to be circulated at high velocities through the tubes, resulting in greater heat transfer and higher operating efficiencies, says the company. For more information, see the Johnson Controls Web site.
