WPCY Water-Cooled Screw Chiller

The WPCY is SKM's water-cooled screw chiller, spanning 82 to 375 TR (288–1,318 kW) on R-134a. Water-cooled chillers reject heat to a cooling tower or fluid cooler circuit rather than to outdoor air, which keeps condensing temperatures lower than air-cooled equivalents even in 50 °C summer conditions. The result is a higher base COP — the WPCY brochure positions the series as one of the highest-COP water-cooled screw chillers in the Gulf HVAC market — making water-cooled plant the right choice whenever the capital cost of a cooling tower is acceptable and sustained low operating cost is the priority.

The WPCY uses a high-efficiency semi-hermetic screw compressor with 5-to-6 rotor profile and stepless capacity modulation. Both the evaporator and condenser are shell-and-tube with flooded refrigerant-side design, carbon-steel shells, and high-efficiency internally and externally finned copper tubes mechanically expanded into the tube sheet. An electronic expansion valve tracks refrigerant mass flow precisely at all load points. The condenser shell is shared across dual-compressor configurations, which provides additional heat-transfer surface during part-load single-compressor operation — a passive efficiency gain. BMS connectivity is available via BACnet (IP), Modbus RTU and IP natively, with LonWorks and Johnson N2 via external adapters. Rated under AHRI 550/590.

This model is the correct central-plant choice for large airports with existing cooling-tower infrastructure, major hotels, district cooling schemes, and large mixed-use developments where the building's thermal density justifies a mechanical room with dedicated water-side infrastructure. Single-phase redundancy (dual-compressor variants) provides fault tolerance within one physical unit.