WINCHESTER, Ky. - When plans called for increased capacity of the chilled-water plant at Martek Bioscience Corp.'s Winchester facility, management was facing several challenges. Production could not be interrupted, there was little room to expand the plant inside the building. In addition, they needed not only additional tonnage but also conversion from a primary-only system to a primary-secondary chilled-water system due to the variable demand of the process for chilled water. Martek decided to replace the aging, inefficient chiller plant with a prefabricated, modular central chiller plant (MCCP).
The Stellar Group, a Jacksonville, Fla., MCCP fabricator, offered a turnkey approach that appealed to Martek's management. Stellar's use of two MAXEâ„¢ centrifugal chillers (equipped with the OptiSpeedâ„¢ variable-speed control) enabled Martek to increase the tonnage of its chiller plant capacity by 60 percent using half the space.