The curse of the commercial split-system in offshore vessels & platforms

We lost our entire National Historic Museum, located in Rio de Janeiro due to incompetence, sloppiness, lack of technical knowledge, nut economy and mostly ignorant managers on the subject regarding air conditioning systems, electrical installations and necessary protections.

Fires in this type of equipment have become commonplace, due to inadequate use, poor installation and the usual lack of preventive maintenance.

These equipment are designed for intermittent service and not for continuous service, so the use in homes, offices and commercial establishments serves the purpose, but not in places where the use of the equipment is continuous, and necessarily stand-by equipment, must be installed.

Currently, commercial split-systems, the same ones you can buy at "Casas Bahia" or any other appliance store, are being inadvertently installed in offshore support vessels and even on oil platforms working continuously !!!

When you visit a fixed platform or FPSO, AHTS, PLSV, PSV, tug boat, pushers, you will always find the doom of commercial split equipment installed.

The normal expected in naval facilities are:

- Condensing Unit + Air Handling Units

- Chillers + Fan-Coils

(*) But there are other technical solutions with competitive prices, safer and suitable for naval use, the main ones being:

- Mini self-contained units (as shown above in the old photo) for individual installation in cabins and other compartments of the vessel, with direct expansion and condensation with seawater or using industrial water from the centralized plate heat exchanger . These devices may have more robust electric motors, shell & tube type condensers, or lighter electric motors and "tube in tube" condensers.

The low price of the commercial split equipment rejoices "smart buyers", the same ones who understand nothing about shipbuilding rules and safeguards of life at sea.

The strangest of all, is that the shipyards must have engineers responsible for the design of the vessels, and these guys are accepting or being forced to accept anything (poor equipment and installation).

I have been working on the design, construction, maintenance of offshore HVAC-R systems since 1979, and have never seen so many technical absurdities either in requesting of new design, technical evaluation or corrective maintenance.

Not even the care with the materials used in the construction of the equipment is being observed by the customers, because today they are buying only price and not durability and reliability.

I have written several articles on offshore and marine HVAC-R, but I realize that I am working on cold iron because what really matters to most buyers and "technical managers" is the low price, even if the risk is high.

Sorry, but I refuse to accept that the construction and naval operation in Brazil has definitely adopted for HVAC-R systems in offshore vessels and offshore facilities the (QMS) poor standard.

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Marine & Offshore HVAC-R