Open Access

Breweries employ numerous heat-giving processes, especially during brewing and fermentation, so most breweries have industrial ammonia refrigeration plants, which work like classic refrigeration units. There, the gaseous ammonia gets compressed, condensed, and distributed to the applications where heat has to be taken out off. Here an expansion valve reduces pressure so the liquid ammonia can absorb the heat from the process fluid to be cooled, evaporating the liquid ammonia. At this point, the ammonia, carrying latent and sensible heat, is sucked back to the compressors, and the cycle begins again. This thesis analyses the ammonia refrigeration plant of the brewery Göss, one of the largest breweries in Austria, which requires about 20% of electrical energy and consumes nearly one quarter of the brewery’s water usage. Currently, rising energy costs necessitate making the refrigeration plant more efficient. Hence, research should investigate the future cooling capacity load of the plant to discover how to make the cooling process operate more efficient. To discover how the system operates, this thesis elaborates on the basic theoretical foundation of refrigeration plants and their thermodynamic fundamental principle. To create the mentioned forecast, this study examines process recordings and evaluations of the main consumers cooling demand. These selected apparatuses are the external beer cooler, the brew water cooler for cooling the hot wort, which is the beer mixture before the fermentation and the fermentation process itself in two different types of tanks. Using these data, the researcher creates abstracted load forecasts for these consumers to control the delivering pumps of liquid ammonia to the right amount of mass flow. Subsequently, the process recordings of the fermentation tanks are divided into four different process phases. These stages need various quantities of cooling fluid, and the last stage, the main cooling and draining phase, requires the largest amount of liquid ammonia delivered. Finally, the external beer cooler and brew water cooler are investigated as recurring and evenly ongoing processes so that they are predictable in the cooling load. In closing, the researched recordings provide an overview and abstracted view of the cooling load required by the selected consumers. Additionally, further investigation could investigate the possibility of controlling distributing pumps to deliver the sufficient amount of refrigerant medium, at the right time, in a more efficient way.