Refrigeration system

With remote monitoring, refrigeration system maintenance becomes targeted instead of reactive. Conventional mobile refrigeration units operate autonomously, and malfunctions often go unnoticed until a failure occurs. Today, Climate Energy sees the condition of all its units on the VISUALYS platform, faults are reported immediately and visits are planned precisely. An Australian refrigeration service provider has introduced automatic service intervals that send a notification as soon as maintenance is due.

A refrigeration monitoring system mainly records temperatures, refrigerant circuit pressures, component status signals and alarms. At Climate Energy, this includes actual temperature, set values for cooling and heating, evaporator inlet and condensing pressure, plus status signals from compressors, pumps and fans. Fault logs are added, for example on overheating, pressure deviations or pump failure. This also helps avoid load peaks and even out temperature fluctuations.

IoT supports the cold chain by having the refrigeration unit report its condition and the cargo temperature to the service partner in real time. In Australia, shortly before Christmas, the cooling on a truck carrying fruit and vegetables failed without the driver noticing. An alarm reached the service team, who directed him to the nearest depot, and the goods arrived at the correct temperature. In another case, the data proved that a strawberry delivery had been kept properly chilled.

The first step is transparency: only when consumption is measured per chiller do inefficient units stand out. A rolling bearing manufacturer in Bangalore uses Itanta to monitor more than 80 energy meters, including those of its chillers. After Perinet's retrofit, one cooling system operator compared running times and consumption and reduced the excess consumption of individual units. NTT DATA itself expects its data centres to need 35 to 40 percent less energy for cooling.