ICS champions critical cooling system upgrade
30th March 2025
UK: ICS Cool Energy has helped deliver a critical cooling system upgrade at the Princess Royal University Hospital in Orpington.
The hospital was dealing with outdated cooling infrastructure and needed a reliable and efficient replacement system to maintain precise temperatures for essential medical equipment, sensitive medications, and hospital environments.
The chiller plant’s location on the hospital roof posed logistical challenges for dismantling the old equipment and transporting and installing the new ones. Additionally, providing a temporary cooling capacity of 1.8MW was crucial to ensure seamless hospital operations during the refurbishment.
Given the logistical challenges posed by the rooftop location and due to the restrictions imposed on crane usage, the consultants specification deemed it necessary to flat-pack all the chillers for removal and installation.
Construction company Vinci engineered and built an extensive scaffold from the ground-level compound to the roof, incorporating an integral hoist to facilitate the positioning of the equipment on site.
To maintain uninterrupted operation of the hospital’s critical systems and operating theatres throughout the project, ICS Cool Energy harnessed its decades long expertise in temporary cooling solutions. With a selection of 500kW high-performance chillers readily available for hire and rapid deployment, ICS Cool Energy was able to quickly deliver and install three chillers as temporary support.
The complexity of the temporary install was further amplified by the need for “hot tapping” – attaching to a pipeline without depressurising or disrupting normal operations – which was crucial to putting the hire chillers in place and provide immediate and reliable cooling during the transition.
For the final new cooling system, the team selected three 600kW HVAC chillers featuring R513A refrigerant.
The meticulous flat-packing process involved disassembling the chillers into their components parts, starting with the removal of fans and panelling, and safely extracting refrigerant from the system. Each piece was carefully labelled to ensure accurate reassembly.
Following reassembly, the system was recharged with refrigerant, tested and commissioned following the completion of pipefitting, fluid filling, electrical supplies, and ducting.
The old chillers were flat packed and taken down the same way.
