This report originally appeared in the September 2010 issue of DOTmed Business News

Want to raise the ire of a chiller manufacturer? Call and tell them you are looking for a chiller for an MR or CT and you don’t care what type you get.

“I will have a contractor call me and state ‘a chiller is just a chiller,’ but that’s not true at all when it comes to the medical industry,” says Kim Bernard, sales application engineer for Dimplex Thermal Solutions. “They are operational critical units that are in use 24 hours a day to maintain helium charges and you may have a patient who has an emergency scenario that requires full function for MRI or CT scan. Being out of service is just not an option.”
Filtrine has been in business since 1901 and is one of the leading medical chiller manufacturers, and often must explain to customers that they can’t go out and buy something designed for an HVAC system and apply it to medical equipment.

“You are protecting millions of dollars in investments and you need to look at the specifics for your piece of equipment and apply them properly to cool it properly,” says Filtrine’s medical chiller specialist Mark Bond. “Each brand of medical equipment requires a specific chiller as they all have their own thermal profile and accessories that can impact the amount of heat that needs to be dealt with. The quality of the equipment and quality of service will go a long way in making everything run smoothly.”

Since most major medical devices generate heat while in operation, the chilled water generated by the chillers is the solution to dissipate the heat that is produced. Finding ways to do this to present a better carbon footprint has been a hot topic in the industry.

“There are a lot of innovations occurring in the chiller industry with regards to green technology, brought to the forefront again after the gulf oil incident,” says Bernard. “We're experiencing renewed interest in technologies that reduce overall energy use."

Industry experts estimate that in the U.S. market alone, there are more 200,000 process chillers in operation and research suggest only about 3 percent of these chiller systems have been retrofit to reduce kilowatt-hours.

“In our view, energy consumption is the big buzz that we are really focused on and what our customers are talking about,” says Martin King, senior fluid systems designer for Legacy Chiller Systems. “They are all concerned about how much power chillers take to provide the cooling that they are supposed to provide, so we are pretty heavily invested in that.”

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