Process temperature.
Production at ease.

Industrial refrigeration is part of the production technology, not comfort air conditioning with more capacity. An injection moulding machine running too hot, a CNC laser without cooling or temperature swings in a semi-finished goods store mean downtime, a scrapped batch and losses in the hundreds of thousands of zlotys. The scope covers process cooling of machinery (injection moulding machines, lasers, presses, furnaces, glass tempering and fusing stations), cold and freezer rooms for the food industry, including solutions for frost build-up and air dehumidification, and heat recovery from condensers for hall heating and domestic hot water. That is why we start with a thermal audit: we sum the gains from machinery (in glass plants the tempering furnaces dominate the balance) plus solar gains, lighting, people and air exchange.

The balance gives the cooling capacity and the reserve for heatwaves. Undersizing ends with a lost parameter in July; oversizing ends with a chiller cycling at low load, more expensive to buy and quicker to wear out its compressors. The sum of machine nameplate ratings is not the chiller capacity: the real simultaneity factor lies in the range 0.6–0.8. The order is fixed: first we limit heat gain at the source (machine enclosures, local extraction, recovery), then we select the cooling capacity.

A chiller with an air-cooled condenser is the default solution for most plants in Poland: it needs no cooling tower, no water treatment and no Legionella risk management, and with free cooling the difference in annual efficiency largely disappears. A water-cooled condenser makes sense above several hundred kW with continuous operation and limited space outside the building. In a typical process installation the chiller accounts for roughly half of the total cost.

The choice between direct expansion (DX) and an indirect system determines operating costs for 15–20 years. DX is more efficient and cheaper to install with one or two consumers close to the chiller, but it has a large refrigerant charge throughout the installation, and leaks are harder to locate. An indirect system contains the refrigerant in the plant room, with a charge several times smaller, which simplifies F-gas obligations and service, at the cost of a 2–4 K loss across the heat exchanger. It is the standard with many consumers spread across the hall; in a production plant it almost always wins, because one failure does not stop the whole production, and adding another consumer does not require intervention in the refrigerant circuit.

Precision air conditioning for server rooms and technical rooms, measurement laboratories, stores for sensitive substances, cleanroom support areas and metrology zones holds ±1 °C and ±5% RH; a comfort system works with a tolerance of ±2–3 °C and usually does not control humidity. Precision units have a sensible heat ratio (SHR) of 0.9–1.0 compared with 0.65–0.75 for comfort units, so almost all their capacity goes into cooling, not dehumidification. A comfort split gives 25–35% of its capacity to dehumidification and is not designed for 24/7 operation at low winter temperatures.

A split is sized on room volume and solar gains, while in a production hall the dominant heat gain comes from machinery. A production hall needs zonal cooling, not volume-based cooling: in a building a dozen or more metres high you cool the working zone, not the space under the roof. We use local cooling of workstations, air curtains and supply air with destratification, and with gains of several hundred kW, a chilled water system with fan coil units or AHUs with cooling coils. From 11 January 2027 the temperature in a hall may not exceed 35 °C, and the obligation to act arises once 28 °C is exceeded.