Cooling plant replacement and refurbishment. Building while the production process continues

Evers Specials has been working with Van Kempen Koudetechniek for over thirty years. Also for the expansion and new construction in Nijmegen, Van Kempen was called in again. The cooling installation that the company delivered in the eighties will now be replaced by a new one. Also in the new building will be an installation from Van Kempen.

The decentralized units that Evers Specials currently uses work with a synthetic refrigerant. These will be replaced by a central refrigeration unit using ammonia, a natural refrigerant that is very energy-efficient. It has a Global Warming Potential of 0, says Dick de Waal, account manager at Van Kempen Koudetechniek. "The cooling capacity will be 620 kW and the heating capacity 737 kW. There are five compressors on it, one of which is speed-controlled to optimally meet the load of the number of cold rooms."

Reuse of energy

It involves a total of four cold rooms for the existing and new construction. There will also be two processing areas, a refrigerated shipping area and a large vacuum cooler. "There the products are cooled from 25 to 4°C in less than half an hour," explains De Waal, before continuing, "What is special about this installation is that it functions as a heat pump. All condenser heat is used to heat the process water. When there is no load on the cooling cells, the heat can still be generated by cooling the wastewater. There is a great emphasis on sustainability and energy conservation. All energy is reused. All this is optimally controlled by our in-house designed control system VK-Dynamics"

Work continues

Although there is a lot of construction going on at Evers Specials in Nijmegen, the production process must not suffer. That is why at the end of the summer the new building will first be put into operation. After that, the existing cold stores will be converted to the new installation one by one.