How do you cool an ice-cream factory?

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In summer, when the love of ice cream reaches its peak, the energy required for ice cream production rises. The air conditioning requirement is high and the solar thermal system, which is designed for the transitional period, together with the existing 50 compressors, produce heat in excess. With FAHRENHEIT adsorption technology, this available waste heat can be converted into cold in an environmentally friendly way to save energy and resources and avoid overloading the plant.

We spoke with Olaf Höhn, Managing Director of Florida Eis, a long time FAHRENHEIT customer, about his experiences with our adsorption technology. They use our adsorption chillers, among other technologies, to make their ice cream production process sustainable and CO2 neutral. For more than seven years, Florida Ice has been air-conditioning the production room with our energy-saving technology, saving at least four tons of CO2 emissions per year.

Many thanks to Olaf Höhn and the whole team of Florida Eis for this interview!

You can watch the complete interview on YouTube.

Here you can find more information about this project and solar cooling.

Photo: Marc Schulte, pexels

Event information: Flexibility Technologies – Hybrid Energy Supply

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Compact seminar on the 27th of May 2020 about an exciting topic in the times of reformed energy policies, sectors coupling, and district development. Gregor Feig, our Head of Sales, will hold a presentation about Hybrid Cooling.

Link to the program.

Link to the registration.

You can contact us at sales@fahrenheit.cool or 0049 89 340762-25 to receive a discount code.

eCoo S: Energy-efficient cooling – now also available in size S

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Our eCoo product line of silica-gel-based adsorption cooling systems have proven themselves in hundreds of installations worldwide. With drive temperatures ranging from 50°C to 95°C, they are suitable for numerous applications across industries.

Now our eCoo product line, which is known for reliability, performance, and energy-efficient cooling, is being extended. Introducing eCoo S: Just as reliable, now even smaller.

Sometimes energy-efficient adsorption cooling technology needs to be smaller, e.g. for coupling with low-power CHPs (15-20 kW thermal), or solar thermal systems. The eCoo S has a cooling capacity of 10kW and is about the size of a refrigerator. It is characterized by longevity and low maintenance, as the cooling modules have no moving parts.

Like other adsorption cooling units, eCoo S is eligible for subsidies by the German government, as well as equivalent subsidies in other countries. Using these subsidies, the purchase of a small adsorption cooling unit can easily be more cost-efficient than the purchase of a conventional compressor unit. Depending on the project, the payback period for the investment can be as low as one year.

Data Centers Cooling Themselves: SuperMUC-NG Science Symposium at LRZ

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FAHRENHEIT participated in the SuperMUC-NG Next-Gen Science Symposium of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching on November 22, 2018. Together with the LRZ as host as well as with Intel, Lenovo, and SuSE, the team of experts explained the high-performance computer, its operating system and adsorption cooling technology, and answered all questions of the journalists in attendance. One of the very exciting talking points was Fahrenheit’s adsorption cooling technology which is used for cooling the new SuperMUC-NG high-performance computer.

Adsorption cooling offers enormous potential for energy savings in data centers, as all computing power is converted into waste heat, which can be used for environmentally friendly cooling. Second only to the computer hardware, cooling consumes most of the power in data centers.

The room filled up quickly, and FAHRENHEIT’s Matthias Hoene demonstrated the adsorption cooling technology in the form of a small science experiment. The participants watched as the water instantly turned into ice. After an exciting and lively discussion with the technical experts, everybody went to visit the SuperMUC-NG, which ranks eighth in the recently published TOP500 list of the fastest computers in the world. The discussion was followed by a symposium with high-profile representatives from politics and academia. The event served to highlight the scientific knowledge created using the new SuperMUC-NG in fields such as medicine, climate research, or astrophysics.

Overall, it has been a great day with interesting participants, many remarkable facts, and inspiring conversations, successfully blending theory and practice from the world of high-performance computers.

Cooling with Waste Heat from Compressed Air Systems – Generating Huge Energy Savings

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Almost all industrial manufacturing facilities use compressed air systems. At the same time, the cooling demand in industrial facilities keeps on rising, and drives energy consumption. Adsorption cooling provides an ideal approach for solving both ends of the problem: Re-using waste heat to generate cold, thereby decreasing energy demand.

More than three quarters of the electrical energy for compressed air systems can be recovered as heat in the form of hot water. While most of the time, there is no commensurate heating demand, the temperatures are well within the sweet spot of the operation range of adsorption chillers. Therefore, combining air compressors and adsorption chillers creates the perfect opportunity for energy efficiency optimization whenever cooling is needed – whether for process cooling or for air conditioning.

Furthermore, a free cooling function (integrated as standard option in Fahrenheit adsorption chillers) allows for the cooling load to be covered in cold winter days without the need for the heat recovered from the compressed air system, which in turn can be used at that time for heating purposes – which drastically decreases the annual energy demand.

In addition, Fahrenheit adsorption chillers are also eligible for government subsidies in Germany which cover up to 40% of the capital investment costs and which significantly improve the economic viability of such applications, with payback periods ranging from 2 to 4 years.

A case example: Galek & Kowald GmbH from Mühlhausen (Thür.)/Germany planned and installed just such a system for Alupress GmbH in Hildburghausen. An eCoo 20X adsorption chiller by Fahrenheit is driven by the waste heat from air compressors. A large share of the cooling power generated by the eCoo 20X is used for drying the compressed air for the production process, covering a cooling load of 41 kW throughout the year. The eCoo 20X will save more than 60 MWhe per year, paying back the investment in less than 3 years.

Tri-Generation Continues to Spread in the German Market After Some Great Recent News

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The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie) announced on May 8th, 2018 that, an agreement has been reached with the EU Commission regarding the Renewable Energies Law levy (“EEG-Umlage”) for CHP plants. According to the agreement, CHP plants operators will continue to pay only 40% of the levy, clearing the uncertainty about the future of CHP plants in Germany which lasted for over 6 months, after pressure from the EU Commission to charge the operators the full levy amount. The agreement will still need to be turned into law, nevertheless this was a huge step forward – and great news for the industry.

This ensures that tri-generation (combined heat, power, and cold generation) will remain vastly more economical than conventional compression cooling and boiler heating, whether it is applied in industrial facilities, hotels, data centers, hospitals, office buildings, or any place where cooling, heating, and electricity are required.

The subsidies for CHP plants, and the German BAFA subsidy for adsorption, along with the fact that FAHRENHEIT adsorption chillers can save up to 90% electricity compared to compression chillers, as well as extend the operation time and electricity generation of the CHP plant in the warmer days, make these kinds of projects very desirable with a payback period of around 2 to 3 years for most tri-generation projects in Germany.

Continuing the favorable treatment of tri-generation also benefits the phase-out of harmful HFC coolants in favor of pure water, as used in adsorption cooling.

First Adsorption Solar Cooling Project in Saudi Arabia

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Under the supervision of Prof. Radwan Almasri, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Qassim University is installing the first adsorption solar cooling system in Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2018.

Since the announcement of the Saudi Vision 2030 and the decision to gradually shift the Kingdom from fossil fuels to alternative clean energy sources, and since air conditioning and cooling account for more than 70% of the electricity consumption in the Kingdom, people are searching for alternative energy efficient solutions for air conditioning. We at Fahrenheit have been receiving lots of requests for our adsorption chillers.

Prof. Almasri, who is an expert in solar thermal energy and energy efficiency applications, has been trying to introduce this technology in the region for years, but the cheap electricity prices were always an obstacle. Due to the recent changes and announcements in the energy sector, he was finally able to introduce adsorption technology to the region.

The system will have a cooling capacity up to 13 kW and is expected to save around 80% of electricity consumption, compared to a conventional compression system. The Fahrenheit adsorption chiller eCoo 10 Climatix will be re-cooled by a cooling tower and will supply cooled air via fan coils. The adsorption chiller will also include an energy balancing set which will accurately evaluate the performance of the chiller, helping make this project a future reference in the region.

In a country where cooling is a necessity, and electricity prices are expected to rapidly increase over the next few years, adsorption cooling can be a solution to a wide range of applications in the HVAC sector.

FAHRENHEIT Wins German Data Center Award 2018

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We are very happy about winning 1st place at the German Data Center Awards 2018 in the data center cooling & climatization category for cooling data centers using CPU heat.

The prize was awarded for our adsorption cooling technology which uses the low temperature residual heat from servers for cooling air-cooled components, or for air conditioning the data center itself. By re-using the server heat, instead of electric power, to drive chillers, the technology can save up to 90% of the electricity required for cooling.

The technology is based on our zeolite crystallization process, which makes adsorption feasible at the low drive temperatures typical for CPUs, from around 50°C. The technology is already in practical use at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre’s CoolMUC-2, and it will soon be implemented at a much larger scale for the new SuperMUC-NG by Lenovo, which will become operational from the fall of 2018.

The award ceremony was held as part of the German data center convention “Future Thinking” in Darmstadt on April 24, 2018. There have been 51 submissions among all 8 categories; the cooling & climatization category was the most heavily contested one with a total of 13 applications.