The Yukon CO2 chiller range, displayed for the first time at Chillventa 2018 by Italian system manufacturer Enex, can now be used as a reversible heat pump and air-conditioner in commercial buildings.
“We are now installing the first versions with reversible operations,” Sergio Girotto, president of Enex, told R744.com at the HVAC&R tradeshow, held in Nuremberg, Germany on 16-18 October. “It means they work as heat pump in winter and as a chiller in summer.”
The Yukon, Enex’s new family of CO2-based ‘plug and play’, medium-sized water/brine chillers, comes in two offerings. One uses a pressure receiver for units up to 60 kW that permits a capacity increase and assures redundancy. The second unit, which uses gravity-fed evaporators, is a larger range of up to 450 kW and can be used with Enex’s enjector technology.
“Nobody believed so far that CO2 could be a good refrigerant for water chillers, but [with the Yukon chiller range] we proved that it is efficient,” Girotto said. “[The enjector] makes the chiller efficient at 35oC ambient temperature.”
The Yukon is particularly suited to space cooling in medium and large commercial buildings with a significant hot water demand, such as hotels, hospitals, gyms and wineries.
Two of these CO2 chillers provide heating and cooling at the Abazzia di Novacella winery in the Alto Adige (South Tyrol) region of Italy. Each of Enex’s Yukon chillers, installed in August 2017, has a cooling capacity of 60 kW. The two units are used to cool must when it increases in temperature during the fermentation phase; at the same time, heat recovery produces sanitary water at 90°C for cleaning the wine barrels.
