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Daikin Air Cooled Chiller Helps Maintain Low Temperature at Uniq's New Sandwich Production Facility
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A newly installed Daikin air cooled scroll chiller, which adds to the 1800kW of cooling previously provided by 5 existing Daikin screw chillers at the ‘state of the art’ Northampton factory of Uniq plc subsidiary, Uniq Prepared Foods, supplies top up cooling for a new food production area.
Uniq plc has a turnover of around £750 million and manufactures a wide range of well known chilled and frozen food products, which it supplies to retail and food service customers throughout the UK and continental Europe.
Uniq Prepared Foods is an award winning supplier of high quality sandwiches, wraps and deli products, principally for a major high street retailer and several airlines. An enviable combination of cutting edge automated technology and a highly skilled workforce enables the company to match quality to quantity to ensure that its products are produced to the same exacting standards.
Late last year, a new chiller was required to provide additional cooling for the conversion of some main bulk storage areas into a new sandwich production facility. Specialist contractor, ITEC Industrial Services Ltd, Halesowen, West Midlands, was engaged to engineer and install the new chiller plant – a 260kW EWAQ260 R-410A air cooled unit — supplied by Daikin Airconditioning UK Ltd.
The new Daikin chiller provides chilled glycol at 00C to the cooling coils of a specially designed McQuay air handling unit, which supplies the production area with precisely controlled tempered fresh air.
ITEC managing director, Bob Garner, comments: “It is vital that air conditioning systems for this type of application prevent the ingress of micro organisms and retard or prevent their growth. Also, they must not be the primary cause of contamination and must prevent cross contamination and air turbulence. This can only be achieved by high levels of filtration, draught free air distribution, careful room pressurisation and the provision of cool air temperatures between 10 and 120C.”
“ITEC has considerable experience of supplying chilled water systems for food engineering and other process cooling applications and the good part load efficiency, precise water temperature control, advanced technology and reliability inherent in the Daikin EWAQ range represented an ideal solution to the requirements of this particular application.”
The EWAQ260 is top capacity model of this recently introduced range of Daikin air cooled chillers, has an EER of 2.70 at full load and excellent part load efficiencies. Designed for the supply of chilled water at temperatures down to -100C, it is fitted with micro processor control and a new Daikin ‘Pcaso’ controller with user friendly and powerful LCD interface.
The McQuay air handling unit delivers high levels of air filtration up to H11 standard and incorporates ‘free cooling’ motorised modulating dampers to enable fresh air to be used for cooling during low ambient conditions. At Uniq Prepared Foods, the conditioned air is delivered via ceiling mounted textile ‘socks’, which run the length of the production area and gently distribute it evenly and without turbulence and draughts.
