Case Study

Trinity College Dublin:
Turnkey Chiller Installation

Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is recognised internationally as Ireland’s premier university and is ranked 14th position in the top 200 European universities by the QS World University Rankings.

TCD campus, located in Dublin City Centre, occupies some 51 acres (including the Trinity Technology and Enterprise Campus).

The Solution

In 2019, Sirus was engaged to install energy-efficient cooling on the TCD Campus, first at the Lloyd building followed closely by the CRANN building.

Lloyd Building

The Lloyd is a 5 storey building with 2 basement levels. The first basement level contains MRI rooms which require critical services cooling.

Sirus installed a new high-efficiency 400 kW Air-cooled QUANTUM Turbocor Chiller from ENGIE Refrigeration to replace an end of life chiller which had been serving the building for the last 15+ years.

A redesign of the chilled water system allowed for the incorporation of a 90 kW Mitsubishi E Series High-efficiency Chiller, one of the first in Ireland at the time. This chiller serves as a dedicated redundancy for MRI systems that are used in the building.

Sirus also carried out BMS modifications to allow for this duty standby arrangement.

CRANN Building

The CRANN (Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices) is one of the largest research institutes in Trinity College Dublin and Ireland’s leading nanoscience institute.

On the roof of the CRANN building, Sirus installed one 600kW and one 400kW Engie Air-cooled QUANTUM Chiller to replace a 1.1MW twin screw chiller. Both chillers were installed to work in tandem to maintain building load.

These new chillers from ENGIE Refrigeration come with Thermosiphon Free Cooling. This means they can potentially deliver 40% of their nominal capacity without compressor operation, using the natural convection of refrigerant.

The installation of these chillers involved:

Transportation and contract crane lift.
Removal and safe disposal of the existing chiller and refrigerant.
Pipework modifications to suit the new chillers including new valves, strainers and DRV’s.
Modification of the Main CHW Header.
Lagging of pipework.
Supply of Relevant O&M Materials.

The Result

The load of the CRANN building is now being maintained by the 600kW chiller running at around 30% capacity for most of the time. The client has already noticed huge savings on energy bills and a significant improvement in the quality of the electrical supply to the building.

Some of the lab equipment on site is very sensitive to spikes and slumps in voltage. Historically, whenever the large screw compressors on the twin screw chiller started, there was a noticeable slump, which influenced on the reading generated in the labs. Since the energy-efficient Chillers were installed, there hasn’t been a single noticeable instance of the power slumping.