Database of Chiller Curves

chiller
performance-curve
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Is anyone aware of a good (up to date) database of curves of some of the major chillers on the market (not necessarily the curves in energy model (DOE) format, but the data needed to build those curves)? I know there used to be one from some EnergyPlus source and it’s been included in IES, but they are old and don’t match current products. It looked like the TPEX.org site was going to do it, but don’t seem to have a chiller category.

It seems that every project I work on I have the same conversations with manufacturer reps who don’t know where to get the curves. Once I get ahold of the engineering department of the manufacturer then I can usually get some data, but I can’t always get there.

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bbrannon4

asked 2018-07-12 06:13:36 -0500

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I know of no such database. Chiller suppliers are generally helpful, before Tender stage. I have found creating chiller curves from limited (i.e 10 point part load for Constant CW and AHRI CW relief ) curves is necessary.

TomB (2018-07-13 04:01:38 -0500) edit

Trace used to have a decent database of Trane and York chiller curves.

kramerica (2019-08-22 17:03:49 -0500) edit

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I believe the EnergyPlus database you're referring to is the one in C:\EnergyPlusVX-X-X\DataSets\Chillers.idf. This file has curves for 163 different chiller models from various manufacturers. However, it states "Performance curves developed from information collected over a 10-year period from 1991 to 2001", so it's a bit dated.

Also of use related to this are the 'HVACCurveFitTool' (C:\EnergyPlusVX-X-X\PreProcess\HVACCurveFitTool) which produces curves in IDF format from manufacturer data, and 'CoeffConv' (C:\EnergyPlusVX-X-X\PreProcess\CoeffConv), which converts performance curves from IP (i.e. eQUEST/DOE2) to SI units (i.e. EnergyPlus).

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ericmartinpe

answered 2019-07-22 11:44:50 -0500

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Thanks, it's my impression that this is the most recent of such database around, right? I've compared some of those curves to similar but more modern chillers of the same manufacturers and they are quite a bit different. Seems like we need a update to it.

bbrannon4 (2019-07-22 12:42:14 -0500) edit

Yes, to my knowledge, this is the only chiller curve database that's publicly available.

ericmartinpe (2019-07-22 17:27:29 -0500) edit

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Hi Brannon, previously I tried to ask the supplier to generate the data points for the chiller curves and I did a regression with data to get the coefficients for IES chiller curve. However the curves I got only covers part of the operation conditions and looks very different from the default chiller curves of a similar chiller model. I guess in order to get a more accurate curve we need a lot of data and the only place to get them is from the suppliers' proprietary software/database.