[labnetwork] Local chiller vs. facility chilled water

[Kevin McPeak]

Dear Colleagues,

The central chilled water pump at the facility where the LSU cleanroom is
housed died earlier this week. Facilities told me that they have no plans
for replacing the pump. The cost is too high (15K) and most of the beamline
endstations (our cleanroom lives inside of a synchrotron) have switched to
local chillers.

So I have two options:

1). Buy 4 small chillers for an e-beam evaporator, SEM, ICP, sputtering
system. This number will grow in the future.

2). Buy one large chiller and connect it to the existing 2" diameter
cooling pipe network that is plumbed around the cleanroom perimeter.

I lean towards option #2 but it is less flexible than #1 and could put us
in the same situation we are in now (e.g. most machines down) in the case
of a failure.

The infastructure of our cleanroom is about 25 years old. So I wanted to
ask the list members to get a more modern take on chilled water. Do modern
cleanrooms use central chilled water systems or is the local chiller model
more popular given the added flexibility and more distributed failure model?

Thanks!

Regards,
Kevin

--
Kevin McPeak
Assistant Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering
Louisiana State University
email: kmcpeak at lsu.edu
phone: 225-578-0058
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