Water cooling helps to shrink drives enclosures

A water-based alternative to air-conditioning systems for cooling large drive systems which require high IP ratings, has been developed by Rittal. The company`s Recool technology is based on air-to-water heat exchangers which, it claims, can provide much higher cooling outputs than air-conditioning systems, despite being smaller.

According to Rittal, the water-based cooling system will allow large drives to be housed in smaller enclosures than systems relying on air-conditioning.

To cool a 315kW inverter, the enclosure would contain two 5kW air-to-water heat exchangers, used with a 10kW external chiller to provide the conditioned water supply for the heat exchangers. If there are two enclosures, each housing a single inverter, four 5kW air-to-water heat exchangers would be needed, with a single 20kW chiller.

Because the heat exchangers do not have an external circuit, they are not affected by adverse environmental conditions. The remote chiller can be some distance from the enclosures.