Industrial Air Conditioning

Industrial air conditioning: size on the load

Cooling a production room is not a matter of picking a rating: cooling capacity follows from a heat balance dominated by the lighting, and the heat rejection architecture is decided on the building plan.

The heat balance starts with the lighting

In a sealed room, almost all the installed lighting power reappears as heat: 20 kW of fixtures means around 20 kW to be removed, before motors and gains through the building fabric. A watts-of-cooling-per-square-metre rule describes none of this.

Where the heat goes

Then comes rejection. A single-package unit placed inside the room it claims to cool cannot succeed: it moves the heat within the same space and adds the work of its own compressor. Three architectures answer this: the ducted monobloc, with the condenser connected outside the treated volume; the split; and the chiller, the only one that can be shared between several rooms.

Cooling does not replace the dehumidifier

An air conditioner dehumidifies for as long as it is cooling. But as soon as the temperature setpoint is reached it stops — precisely when transpiration continues and humidity climbs again. Hence the pairing of a cooling stage and a dehumidification stage, interlocked by the same control system.

Points to check

• The units: part of this market is still catalogued in frigories per hour. 1 kW of cooling equals 860 FG/h: a unit quoted at 3,000 FG delivers 3.5 kW of cooling and draws around 1 kW. That is an output, never a consumption.
• Condensate: water flow is continuous in a humid room, to be removed by gravity or by a lift pump.
• Refrigerant: portable units with a global warming potential of 150 or above have not been placed on the Union market since 2020, and monoblocs up to 12 kW will follow on 1 January 2027. R410A, at a potential of 2,088, is in no sense environmentally benign; R290 falls outside the F-Gas scope but remains flammable, class A3.

Net capacity, heat rejection and integration with the control system depend on the building as much as on the crop: room cooling is sized from the floor plan and the installed power, then priced on a quotation. Since the sensible and latent loads are calculated together, industrial dehumidification handles the second. The trio of heat, light and ventilation sets out the basics, and this section forms part of industrial climate control.