OWAC is a turnkey system, designed, delivered and implemented by Omega Engineering Inc. We develop, design, engineer, coordinate, supervise, and commission the rollout of OWAC Systems for any particular configuration and scale. The subsequent listing entails the subsections we process to congregate a functional OWAC system that performs to specifications.
- Sea water intake and outfall design
- Pump room and sea water piping and treatment design
- Process systems piping design
- Process control systems design
- Peripheral system design
- Chiller customization design
OWAC Individual, District cooling or Clustered cooling
- Hydronic distribution system design
- Systems communication/monitoring design
- Pump systems design
- Thermal storage design
What is an OWAC plant?
OWAC® is a registered acronym and trade name and stands for ‘Ocean Water Assisted Cooling’. Obviously an OWAC plant uses ocean water to assist in achieving very high operating efficiency, without the penalty of using scarce and expensive potable water and energy consuming cooling towers.
An OWAC plant uses ocean water as a heat sink, and thus has to deal with the characteristics and properties of ocean water in order to function reliably and up to energetic specifications. Ocean water is distinct from potable water in the sense that it is living water teeming with micro and macro bio organisms, and contains a myriad of elements and chemicals that we normally do not design for in standard cooling systems. This makes ocean water particularly difficult to handle and requires careful planning and engineering to make an OWAC plant work and perform as planned.
The big rewards of an OWAC plant are the extreme low operating cost and overall lifecycle cost, which are the result of using spear point high tech vapor compression technology, combined with precision mechanical engineering, careful material selection and process control technology.
The final result is, when compared to real life conventional air cooled cooling equipment, that these plants deliver three times more cooling capacity for the same amount of consumed energy. In practice this means that the greatest operating expense in the lifecycle of a cooling system is reduced with about 70-75 percent.
Low impact installation
OWAC is a low impact concept, which means that is does not disrupt the marine life and the marine environment in a significant way. The intake and outfall setup are designed to have the least amount of interference with the established marine environment.
OWAC design is set up with the appropriate respect for all marine life and the marine environment. This includes the use of bio fouling control methodology and thermal dispersion of returned water into the ocean.
Flexibility and scalability
The OWAC concept has been created with scalable options for the end user. If you are looking for a cost effective cooling solution for a single building office, hotel or apartment complex, or a cluster of buildings in a district cooling configuration, OWAC can serve your particular needs and requirements. Since the investment to yield ratio of an OWAC system is very well balanced we have a casus of a 60 ton system working in an office building with a simple return on the investment of about 3.5 years.
Larger OWAC systems with a high utilization rate have the beneficial effect of economy of scale. But the previous casus indicates that lack of the prior is not mandatory for a justified project.
Sustainable concept
OWAC is based on the philosophy of sustainable technology. This requires the concept to reduce CO2 footprint with at least 50 percent and the energy content of the installation and its materials are as low as technically possible and close to 100 percent recyclable.