Rink Cooling

[schartruse]

I have a friend who manages a rink and has asked me about the feasibility of cooling their rinks in the summer using the existing ammonia system. They do have rooftop units to cool but they hold trade shows on the rink concrete and find it gets too warm. What I believe would most likely happen is that it would most likely cool the slab but won't cool the air in the rink as he would like it to. Any thoughts on this odd idea?

[McFranklin]

So you want to use the rink floor as a radiant cooling source. The reverse of radiant floor heating. You could run the rink floor and chill the slab, but the warm moist air will rise, so your heat transfer will not be the best.
Remember that humidity control is an important part of comfort air. And your clients/customers will be standing on a cold piece of concrete (that might be wet with condensation) so they have cold clammy feet and hot humid air at their face.
That's not what I would call comfortable.

The company that I am working for does a lot of ice rink work, and I have not heard of this use. But I AM new at the ice rink side, most of my experience has been with cold storage and food processing.

A number of venues only have ice when they have an event scheduled. The rest of the year the system is shut down. If the system would work for air conditioning I would think they would run it. The outside air temperature is regularly in the 90 degree F range(32 C) or higher at some of these facilities.

[gregd1401]

Does this rink use glycol or calcium brine as rheir secondary refrigerant? Maybe this could be pumped through FCU's to cool the space that requires conditioning.

[pwned]

I highly doubt its direct expansion. Every once in a while, meth lab cooks would try to steal ammonia from cold processing plants and farms and cause a release.

Even when it happens outdoors, it causes evacuation and such. If for some reason the pipe breaks indoors with a trade show going on I'm not sure what kind of chaos would ensue.

[charlie n]

Don't cool the slab. McFranklin is right. You'll get a cold wet floor & unhappy people. You can use the chiller to cool glycol for an air handler or with a heat exchanger, A Calcium Chloride system can indirectly cool water for an air handler. You may have issues in a "winter only" rink with a too small condenser but that is usually overcome by only using part of the rink chiller compressors.