Direct Cooling Ice Bank Design Info

[nohandslance]

I would like to build my own Ice Bank resevoir to build up
excess cooling water during nighttime hours and am searching for
an answer to how many meters/ft of copper I will need to
attach and submerge into a 70/30 water/glycol solution. Resevoir
is 250gallons. My condensing unit is a 12HP Danfoss Dual Fan.
Should I braze the copper or solder at the joints. My goal is to
help slow down the glycol temp increase during the production day
brought on by the wort cooling in the brewhouse.
thanks in advance for any input
Lance Jergensen
9517411201

[clydemule]

Unfortunately, it is not really that simple. There is not an equation where you just plug in the variables.

Your mostly going to be constrained by fabrication and dollar constraints. If you are building this yourself to save money, what you are able to build is key. Coils are nice (like a big wort chiller), but tough too make in a reasonable size.

A staggered tube arrangement would be easier to build, but takes a lot of brazed or soldered joints.

Is your reservoir round or rectangular? How big is the space in which to insert the coil, or is the top open?

Since this is going to be inline with your glycol pump feeding your FV's, you want to keep pressure drop low. You can do this by putting your coils, or staggered tubes in parrallel.

Another angle is to check out cryogel.com. Cool product. No pun intended.

Ice storage will have the same effect as a large reservoir. The energy storage is just denser (144 times) because of the latent heat of fusion of ice over water.

What is fairly easy to calculate, is the size of reservoir required to keep the temp rise within a given range. But this could be moot since you already have a reservoir you want to use.

Even if you are good at brazing, I would just solder the joints to to the speed of soldering over brazing.

Have fun!

[lhall]

We had a similar problem - we use a 20 bbl cold liquor tank in our walk-in to cool 10 bbls of wort. When we started doing double batches the walk-in couldn't chill the summer 80 F water down fast enough for the second batch. We made a coil of 50 feet of 1" copper, immersed it in the cold liquor tank, and tapped into the glycol system for our fermenters. There were only about five joints we had to solder. Luckily we had some excess capacity to do this on the chiller. It was a cheap solution, much cheaper than a double heat exchanger and new glycol chiller.

[Moonlight]

I used an ice builder at a 100 bbl brewhouse and found it was critical to bubble air up thru the water/tubes to evenly mix the cooling and ice thickness. Had to play with it a bit to be most efficient, then it was a lifesaver.
Just more info for the mix...

[jimvgjr]

Hi Lance,

Your post reminded me of a product I saw a few years ago and have been meaning to try- they are called cryogel balls- and you simply place them in your glycol tank and they freeze and enable the effects of an icebuilder within a glycol system.

http://cryogel.com/

My emails to this company for additional information and to discuss a "brewery" type application have gone unanswered.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with the Cryogel company in any way.

If anyone gives these a try- please post or let me know the results.

Good Luck,

Jim VanderGiessen
GM, Pro Refrigeration Inc.
jimvgjr@prorefrigeration.com