What are some of the larget Central Plants You have Seen??

[MHall]

This is a question for all those who work as building engineers or service larger equipment.


What are some of the largest Central Plants You have Seen, during your years in this industry?? More Specifically, what are some of the largest Central Plants for Comfort air conditioning. We all know that many factories/industrial facilities have large chiller systems, however the largest system specifically designed for comfort air conditioning was the former World Trade Center in NYC. That plant had 7- 7000 ton York Chillers. 49,000 tons of cooling capacity.

Has anybody here ever seen anything that can come close to this?? What was the tonnage?? What building was it in?? Were they doing cooling only, or did they also have heating (Boilers)??

It always great to hear the experiences of others!

PS: I've attached a picture from the WTC Plant

Best

[zw17]

You win.



Ohio State has a very impressive power plant...

CHILLED WATER PLANT
Two 2,000 ton turbine-driven centrifugal chillers, five 2,000 ton dual compressor electric centrifugal chillers, two 775 ton electric centrifugal chillers, a 450 ton electric rotary screw chiller, nineteen cooling towers, and a plate-and-frame heat exchanger have been installed to supply some of the campus from a central chilled water system. Thirty inch mains supply chilled water to some central campus buildings.

Boilers
Just about a million lbs/hr steam capacity.

[Tech Rob]

You win.



Ohio State has a very impressive power plant...

CHILLED WATER PLANT
Two 2,000 ton turbine-driven centrifugal chillers, five 2,000 ton dual compressor electric centrifugal chillers, two 775 ton electric centrifugal chillers, a 450 ton electric rotary screw chiller, nineteen cooling towers, and a plate-and-frame heat exchanger have been installed to supply some of the campus from a central chilled water system. Thirty inch mains supply chilled water to some central campus buildings.

Boilers
Just about a million lbs/hr steam capacity.

I have a picture of the OSU chiller plant you're talking about as the wallpaper on my laptop. I've seen pictures of data centers with 20 York centrifugals lined up in a row.

Although we don't have anything that's WTC-big, down here in FL, you can throw a rock and hit a 7,000 ton chiller plant. One of the biggest ones I work at occasionally is a 13,000 ton plant for a local university that consists of a 1500t Trane CVHB, a 3000t Trane CDHF Duplex, (2) 2000t Carrier 17FAs, (1) 3000t York Turbomaster, and (2) 750t York YTs. They have numerous other smaller plants with Trane Duplexes in the 7,500 to 8,000 ton range.

I've got a lot of pictures I'll post later.

[zw17]

I have a picture of the OSU chiller plant you're talking about as the wallpaper on my laptop.

It's very impressive. I got to see it go through it's stages of being built from a steel structure. The finishing touches are being preformed at this point.

[Tech Rob]

Ohio State University

[CraziFuzzy]

The hospital I work at has got about 8000 tons, but its situated in two different plants. Probably going to be downsized in the next year or so though, removing a couple 750T tranes and replacing them with a single 950T.

[MHall]

Thanks for the replies. I know that the World Trade Center plant, with 49,000 tons is extreme. But, how large of a tonnage capacity is considered large in a chiller plant??

Any other interesting examples would be great!

Best

[maxster]

Kennedy Airport has the largest absorber chiller plant around also handled by York.WTC contract was a easy Million $ anually with a tech 40hrs on site from the day it was installed,and he retired the thursday before the attacks.

[BaldLoonie]

Did the old towers have 1 plant for both?

Mark Beiser saw the main chilled water plant for Indy's district cooling. I forgot what all he said was in there. The system has 2 more elsewhere.

[Control Man]

Heres a nice 12,000 TON job CARRIER did

http://www.docs.hvacpartners.com/idc...asestudy20.pdf

[Control Man]

Dubai has three cooling plants of 35,000 tons, 28,000 tons and 42,000 tons respectively, and when the first phase of the project is completed in mid-2006, the system at total build-out will provide roughly 140,000 tons of refrigeration to cool 69 high rise towers currently under development at Jumeirah Lake Towers.


Also a 115,000 Ton Plant in the Arabian Gulf

[MHall]

Did the old towers have 1 plant for both?

Mark Beiser saw the main chilled water plant for Indy's district cooling. I forgot what all he said was in there. The system has 2 more elsewhere.

I believe the WTC plant provided chilled water for both 110 story towers, the smaller buildings located in the complex, the train station, and the shopping mall. Despite the square footage that had to be cooled, I would bet that they still had quite a bit of redundancy. The plant used water from the Hudson River, as condenser water.

49,000 tons is VERY LARGE. How great of a tonnage is normally considered large?? 1000 tons?? 10,000 tons?? Etc

Thanks for sharing your experiences. It’s always great to hear about those HUGE systems!!

[maxster]

another interesting WTC area rebuild fact in 2012 is both 7WTC and the Freedom Tower are all self-contained water cooled VAV/VFD installs per floor maybe 4 per floor.no more chillers as before.they still pull in the Hudson River for the condensers.the original towers had a load of added on water cooled systems thru-out north and south towers using return chilled water with regulating valves to maintain the heads.working for Trane in '89 we had split air cooled chillers under contract just above that North Tower 86th floor elevator cross over area up the escalator off that lobby.no big tonnages but they were there just below where the first jet hit on 9/11

[CraziFuzzy]

The great thing about chiller plants, is that they are completely scalable. There are no technical limitations in size of the PLANT, just the units themselves. Of course, the sizing of the individual chillers has some scaling problems - and really, in most cases, having a lot of relatively large chillers is going to make a better plant that a few massive ones.

[flange]

A typical plant is usually in the range of 750-3000 tons. yes there are those that are much larger, as in campus wide universities using central chiller plants, hopsitals that sort of thing. When I was an apprentice, 1500-2500 ton MACHINES were commonplace, and punching the tubes on just a few jobs took all winter, by the time you erected scaffolding, pulled the heads etc. Toward the end of my apprenticeship, we installed a plant with 3-2800 ton machines. Then retrofitted two very old open drive machines, 3000 tons each with two 1500 ton compresors per barrel. That was many moons ago though, and lately, a 1000 ton machine is big, with multpiples on a site for redundancy.

[MHall]

Has anybody worked at/toured Con Edison Steam??? Now THAT plant would be interesting to visit. I've heard they have boilers 7 stories tall!!

Anybody ever seen anything like this?

Thanks again for all the imput!

[BaldLoonie]

Supposedly Indy's district heating is 2nd in size only to New York. The plant next door to Lucas Oil Stadium will be converting to gas soon. No more coal trains running, sorry Doobie Brothers.

[flange]

Those old boilers ued to be commonplace, and go back in many cases to the days of coal. In those days, it was coal by the carload, then many went to number six oil, prior to going to dual fuel or gas. I lost a bid at a boeing plant for a few of those boilers, totalling six boilers, at roughly 5000 horsepower if I recall correctly.

I guess I am lucky, as I orked for a company that did all that big stuff back in the day. Now that I am an old man of 45, I see a lot of smaller stuff. Had one account running three, 300 hp boilers at 350 degree hot water for about ten years.

[rscamaro]

This is a question for all those who work as building engineers or service larger equipment.

The largest plant I've seen is The Co-op City (The Bronx) plant. I believe that they were originally Westinghouse steam driven open drives. Now they are steam driven Carrier 17M machines. Retrofitted to the original shells. I don't recall how many chillers are in the plant since I had nothing to do with the retrofit and I was only there one time. I'm thinking that there were at least 4- 6,000ton machines and it could have been up to 6 or 7 of them.

...Ron

[maxster]

back in '96 i was in co-op City when they where R-12 chillers and the engineers said they leaked bigtime,and he quipped that the chiled water supply line to the co-ops had a long time leaking into that Pelham Bay just down from the Conner Street I-95 bridge.did a compressor change at Con Ed Ravenswood steam plant for the control room cooling...spooky bunch of guys in that place watching cameras mounted inside the burner sections watching the flames.after a 5 story walk up within i got to the control room