University's Game Plan for Success: Centralizing chilled water at Urbana-Champaign

摘要

A ging and unreliable chillers are a potential problem for any university campus today. Since many campus cooling systems were developed in the 1960s, their chillers are at or beyond their useful life. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is one such institution, faced with a fleet of dated absorption chillers - nearly 15,000 tons of capacity installed prior to 1970 - and operational problems with several 1980s-era centrifugal chillers. Ranked among the world's top research universities, UIUC is comprised of 16 million gross sq ft of space in more than 200 major buildings on a 1,470-acre central campus. These buildings demand highly reliable cooling, with cooling loads expected to increase in the future. In the mid-1990s, UIUC acknowledged that a reliable long-term solution had to be found to replace failing chillers and ensure ongoing chilled-water service for vital facilities.