Azrieli Center is a huge complex of three skyscrapers and a shopping mall in the heart of Tel Aviv. Construction of the Azrieli Center began in Israel in the mid-1990s, with an unprecedented scope. Azrieli Center changed the Tel Aviv skyline, becoming the harbinger in turning the large city into the "Manhattan” of Israel.
Azrieli Towers
The objective
The complexity of the many challenges facing the then consultants and executors of the air conditioning projects in that complex was also unprecedented. Among them, provision of HVAC to many users with radically different HVAC consumption profiles; ensuring maximum autonomy in their electricity bills; creation of a system-formation that with holds at all of its components a hydrostatic pressure of a 150 meters (!) water column; and all of the above, while providing reliable and durable equipment.
The challenge
The optimal design solution for the shopping mall, which was then the largest of its kind in the Middle East, was the establishment of a Water Source HVAC system, in which the end-units are cooled by cooling tower water, which must include a system of heat exchangers for a circuits-separation, so that the open circuit water does not enter the end-units and pollute them.
However, there’s a catch: Any loss of 1-degree heating temperature that these heat exchangers might squander during the water flow process, represents a surge of 3% in the system's total electricity consumption.
Thus, the huge engineering and performance challenge was to minimize the heat loss of the plate heat exchangers. Six of our manufactured plate heat exchangers with the Ultraflex heat transfer plates technology, were well equipped for standing-up to that demanding challenge
The Project’s Solution
In the “Triangle” Tower
Water cooled VAV HVAC floor-systems have been installed in this building. Here, too, our manufactured equipment has been selected - Shell & Tube water cooled condensers.
In the “Circular” tower
We provided a heat exchanger with a temperature approach capability (LMTD of 1-degree centigrade) allocated for 20 of the tower’s floors which were purchased by a large company, requesting the separation of its air conditioning system from the general HVAC system.
The outcome
The mall, located inside Azrieli Center, opened in 1996, becoming a continuously growing HVAC consumer. In those years there was a huge surge in the use of computing systems, which increased electricity consumption of the HVAC system by 30% and forced the increase of the HVAC facility. Since the concrete-cast cooling towers couldn’t be expanded, the alternative was to expand the heat exchangers and reduce their LMTD. If we wouldn’t have been far-sighted enough in the beginning, and would have designed and installed heat exchangers with symmetrical instead of asymmetrical plates, this solution would not have been engineering-wise feasible. But our asymmetric plates made it possible to accomplish this task.
Good working performance for years to come!
Only one (!) condenser out of about 100 condensers that we have provided for the “Triangle” tower has been renovated after 20 years! A circuit-separator heat exchanger in the “Circular” tower has been working for 23 years without ever tweet of any complaint about it from the complex's maintenance personnel. At times, we are amazed at the records-breaking endurance that our rubber gaskets and other parts of our system show and that they do not succumb to the affliction of times, lasting for decades. This reflects our perspective that advocates uncompromising quality: the less revenue generating customer expenses for spare parts – the more customer’s orders for new projects and facilities.