Order Your Chiller Glycol From JC Younger

Running a business means being prepared to deal with your equipment. Your chiller, for instance, has to be kept running smoothly, or you lose product to inefficiency and malfunctioning machinery. A great way to always be on top of your chiller’s requirements and keep it working well is to have glycol tested regular and having spare on site.

What Glycol Does

Glycol is a water-miscible coolant that is frequently used in heat transfer and cooling applications. It provides better heat transfer parameters than water, and can be mixed with water to provide a variety of heat transfer characteristics. Glycol comes in two varieties: ethylene glycol and propylene glycol. Though both materials are bad for living things, propylene glycol is most often used near food and ethylene glycol is most often used in industrial applications.

To understand the purpose of glycol, you must first understand how a chiller works. A chiller consists of two key parts: a refrigeration unit which uses electrical energy to produce a cold fluid, and heat transfer coils which move cold fluid from the refrigeration unit to the target area and hot fluid from the target area to the refrigeration unit. Typically, the target area is the inside of a freezer or some other object that you want to cool. The refrigeration unit often consists of a compressor with some compressible heat transfer fluid such as freon.

Every chiller has an operating temperature range. This temperature range is determined by several variables, the most important of which are the boiling point and freezing point of the heat transfer fluid. Glycol is prized as a heat transfer fluid because it can operate at a wide range of temperatures and can be mixed with water. The boiling and freezing points of glycol mixtures are a function of the relative amounts of glycol and water in the mixture.

The low freezing points of glycol mixtures make them ideal for cooling items below the freezing point of water. Thus, glycol/water mixtures are often used to cool freezers and similar environments.

The low temperatures associated with glycol mixtures make them useful for applications where a chiller must carry a large amount of heat must away quickly. Heat is a byproduct of many chemical reactions; glycol’s ability to carry heat away quickly makes it useful for maintaining the temperatures of chemical reactions. For this reason, propylene glycol/water mixtures are often used to cool fermenters in brewery applications.

Glycol is an important heat transfer fluid in industrial applications. In addition to offering excellent heat transfer parameters, ethylene glycol tends to discourage algae growth in heat transfer equipment.