Daikin recently supplied 8 water-cooled chiller units to CERN to provide cooling for the High-Luminosity LHC (Large Hadron Collider) project.
The High-Luminosity LHC 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 the gathering of a higher quantity of data and observations of rare processes as the increase in luminosity will make the LHC more powerful.
Products Installed
4x EWWH-VZ
4x EWWS-J
Total cooling capacity: 3.8 MW
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 particles interact and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.
To boost the performance of the accelerator, the 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 this 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. They provide cooling which will be used to dissipate the heat generated by the increased luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider.
As well cooling on a high scale and precision in terms of temperature control, the project also required:
- absolute reliability;
- energy efficient solutions, especially with the energy cost increase the world is facing now; and
- compliance with regulations and environmental sustainability targets.
About the solution provided by Daikin
Daikin’s water-cooled screw units with low GWP refrigerants addressed all these requirements. The Daikin VZ and the Daikin J Series perfectly met CERN’s needs, thanks to the Daikin’s inhouse designed single screw compressor technology, which guarantees exceptionally high efficiency levels.
As well as energy efficiency, the environmental impact aspect was addressed by using units that used 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 performance from a compact footprint. That is achieved thanks to the new screw profile, which allows the compressor to be perfectly optimised for operations with low GWP refrigerants.
The single screw compressor also helped improve reliability of the HVAC system.
Daikin has a history of leadership in the field of single screw compressor chillers which have been installed all over the world over the past 20 years.
Daikin screw compressor is well known for its efficiency. Unlike standard screw compressors, it uses one main screw meshing with twin star rotors to produce volume matching compression cycle. Due to the main rotor, which is balanced in both the radial and axial directions, the compressor bearing is extremely reliable. Therefore, its life span can be significantly longer than other screw compressors. In addition, it only has three moving parts, which minimised the possibility of failure and keeps operation costs.
