Daikin has recently supplied 8 water-cooled chiller units at CERN, providing cooling for the High-Luminosity LHC project.
The High-Luminosity LHC (Large Hadron Collider) project aims to boost the performance of the LHC to increase the potential for discoveries after 2029. The goal of the project is to increase the integrated luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s design value.
That will allow to gather a higher quantity of data and observe rare processes, as the increase in luminosity will make the LHC more powerful.
Products installed
About the project
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. The accelerator sits in a tunnel 100 meters underground at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The 27 km long accelerator is used to boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.
To crank up the performance of the accelerator luminosity will be increased. Luminosity is an important indicator of the performance of an accelerator. It is proportional to the number of collisions that occur in a certain amount of time and allows the experiments to gather more data.
More about the project
More power means more data, but also means more heat, which needs to be removed to ensure the reliability of the equipment used in the experiments.
That is the purpose of the water-cooled screw inverter chillers supplied: providing cooling which will be used to dissipate the heat generated by the increased Luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider.
The project, besides requiring cooling on a high scale and precision in terms of temperature control, required
- absolute reliability
- energy efficient solutions, especially with the energy cost increase the world is facing now
- compliance with regulations and environmental sustainability targets
About the solution provided by Daikin
All the aspects mentioned above were addressed using Daikin water-cooled screw units with low GWP refrigerants. The Daikin VZ and the Daikin J Series perfectly met CERN’s needs, thanks to the Daikin In-house designed Single Screw compressor technology, which can guarantee exceptionally high efficiency levels.
Besides energy efficiency, the environmental impact aspect was addressed by using units with HFO refrigerant R-1234ze and R-513A refrigerant, both with low GWP (Global Warming Potential) values.
The newly redesigned single screw compressor by Daikin stands out for providing outstanding performances despite the compact footprint. That is possible thanks to the new screw profile, which allows the compressor to be perfectly optimized for operations with low GWP refrigerants.
The single screw compressor also helped improving the HVAC system reliability.
Daikin has a history of leadership in the field of single screw compressor chillers, which have been installed all over the world for 20 years.
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Daikin screw compressor, besides being well-knows for efficiency, differently from standard screw compressors, it uses one main screw meshing with twin star rotors to produce volume matching compression cycle. Due to the main rotor, balanced in both radial and axial direction, the compressor bearing has extremely high reliability. Therefore, its life span can be significantly longer than other screw compressors. In addition, having only three moving parts, possibilities of failure are minimized and operation costs kept low.