Daikin Pathfinder AWV Air-Cooled Screw Chiller

The Daikin Pathfinder AWV is an air-cooled screw chiller covering 100 to 565 tons of cooling capacity in a single platform — the widest tonnage span in its class among air-cooled screw products. It uses the same Variable Volume Ratio screw compressor found in Daikin's water-cooled range, pairing it with fully variable-speed ECM condenser-fan motors to achieve an IPLV exceeding 22 EER, a figure Daikin states surpasses the ASHRAE 90.1 Path A efficiency baseline by more than 60%. In practical terms, this means the unit spends the majority of its annual operating hours — typically at 40–70% load in temperate climates — consuming significantly less power than a conventional screw chiller.

Without a cooling tower or condenser water circuit, the Pathfinder is suited to sites where water scarcity, space constraints, or maintenance budgets make evaporative rejection impractical. Airports, cargo terminals, and remote airside facilities frequently fall into this category. An optional closed-loop free-cooling economiser on the water side allows direct heat rejection to atmosphere when ambient wet-bulb is sufficiently low, displacing compressor hours and reducing annual energy cost further.

The refrigerant options — R-513A or R-515B — both carry materially lower GWP than legacy R-134a and position the unit for long asset lives under tightening refrigerant regulations. The architecture is fully factory-configurable for size, fan arrangement, and pump packages, which simplifies integration into constrained mechanical plant rooms. MicroTech controls support BACnet, LonWorks, and Modbus for centralised BMS supervision.