bunker coil

[engrkate]

I am new to refrigeration. What is a bunker coil?

Thanks, Kate

[US Iceman]

Hi Kate,

A bunker coil is usually considered a heat exchanger made of all prime surface tubes. In other words, the coil is made of pipe. No external fins are attached to the pipe.

The coil can be arranged in a single layer or multiple layers. These can be installed adjacent to walls or suspended from the ceiling.

In some applications the coil is submerged in a tank of liquid (cold brine for freezing ice blocks), or, have water sprayed over them to cool the water (hydrocooling).

Some people will also refer to a coil with fins (secondary heat transfer surface) as a bunker coil if the coil assembly does not have fan motors.

Some might make the distinction that bunker coils are those that operate on natural convection air currents (no fans or motors). Coils with fans & motors are called forced convection units.

So as you see, this is similar to a lot of other things you will hear from different people. There is not a general consensus on what something should be called.

Some items even have more than 3 or 4 names. That doesn't help someone to get started, but it's the nature of this business.:o

PS. Welcome to the RE site. Can you tell us a little about your duties and what type of firm you work for?

Best regards,
US Iceman

[engrkate]

Thank you so much for the answer!

I would be happy to tell you about myself.

I work for a consulting engineering company as the engineering manager (been here just 2 weeks). We perform energy-use simulation modeling on DOE2 particularly for refrigeration systems. We focus on energy saving efficiency measures. We also develop and install refrigeration control systems and provide online system monitoring.

My 20 year career has been in product design. I haven't touched refrigeration or thermodynamics since school. I am voraciously reading and studying to come up to speed!

This looks like a good helpful site; keep up the good work!

Kate

[US Iceman]

Does the DOE2 program deal more with the environmental impacts to a system? As you can tell, I have not used this particular program.

If you would like to discuss off line also, you can also contact me via a private message. I strictly do consulting work, but on occasion I have requests for control systems, so it might be helpful to add another name I can refer as a contact.

Take care.