Airedale’s US chiller plant in Rockbridge commences full scale chiller production

Airedale, the critical cooling specialists, is proud to announce that full scale production has commenced at our US chiller plant in Rockbridge, Virginia.

Headquartered in Leeds, UK, Airedale is now proud to operate from additional facilities in Consett (UK), Guadalajara (Spain), Dubai (UAE), Rockbridge (US) and Grenada (US). This milestone is part of a global expansion strategy and in response to high demand for energy and water efficient cooling solutions for a data centre market expanding to meet the demands of a planet increasingly reliant on data.

The plant in Rockbridge has started production of OptiChill air-cooled chillers, which have been engineered specifically for the data centre market and designed by Airedale’s DCS engineering team at the global centre of excellence in Leeds, UK.

Teams from Leeds have travelled back and forth between the UK and US over the past few months in order to support the US plant in building and testing prototypes for the OptiChill range. Following the success completion of this prototype program, a full production run has now begun.

The OptiChill units each provide over 1MW of cooling and have been specially engineered for the demanding and expanding data centre market, where equipment is put through its paces providing critical cooling for servers holding data that supports our digital lifestyles.

The chillers have been designed with:

• Enhanced free cooling technology, offering a wider free cooling envelope even in high ambient regions.
• Glycol containment, ensuring 100% chilled water supply to the data centre, increasing efficiency of heat exchange.
• An on-board variable speed pump, ensuring supply is perfectly matched to load while maintaining water-side TD and saving on external plant requirements.
• On-board active harmonic filtration, ensuring a clean power supply to the data centre, while saving on external plant requirements.
• High capacity twin screw compressors, offering reliability and flexibility with staged capacity control.
• High water temperatures to suit modern data centre designs that prioritise sustainability.
• Robust construction with acoustic insulation features, that can perform in a wide range of climates / settings.
• Enhanced controls including fast start, load limiting and intelligent management of compressors, refrigerant and pumps.

Airedale’s Rockbridge facility is ideally located to serve the US market, with Virginia being the largest data centre region in the world. Northern Virginia is home to more than 20% (100) of all known hyperscale data centres worldwide. Chillers produced here will be supplemented with SmartCool ONETM CRAHs and AireWall fan walls, offering complete cooling solutions for colocation and hyperscale data centre operators.