EIC Solutions offers a wide range of standard and custom cooling solutions designed to protect sensitive electronics and meet the demands of a broad range of offshore and land-based chemical and petrochemical environments – including exploration, drilling, production, refining, storage and servicing.
When reliability and safety are paramount, EIC’s enclosure cooling systems are there to keep processes running smoothly by protecting computers, instrumentation, process controls and other electrical/electronic equipment from damaging heat, dust, moisture, and corrosion.
The Need for Electronic Enclosure Cooling
Worldwide demand for oil and gas has continued to escalate in response to population expansion in developing markets. As old oil and gas fields are depleted, new exploration continues requiring ever increasing drilling, production, storage and distribution needs. In addition, the desire for faster and more efficient production has dramatically increased the demand for state of the art electronic control systems and processes. This coupled with the need for safety in the presence of highly flammable gases and liquids has presented significant challenges to keeping these systems running smoothly.
The petrochemical industry today consists of three major sub-groups:
Upstream – The upstream oil sector is also called the exploration and production (E&P) sector. The upstream sector includes the searching for potential underground or underwater crude oil and natural gas fields, drilling of exploratory wells, and drilling the operating wells that recover and bring the crude oil and/or raw natural gas to the surface.
Midstream – The midstream sector includes the transportation, storage and marketing of the various oil and gas products produced by processing plants and refineries.
Downstream – The downstream sector commonly refers to the refining of petroleum crude oil and the processing and purifying of raw natural gas, as well as the marketing and distribution of products derived from crude oil and natural gas. This includes products such as gasoline or petrol, kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil, heating oil, fuel oils, lubricants, waxes, asphalt, natural gas, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) as well as hundreds of petrochemicals.
As these industry sectors have become more sophisticated and specialized, the processing systems have also continued to require increasing computational power and communications bandwidths. These systems produce significantly higher levels of heat than previous systems and as a result are more sensitive to harsh environmental factors. Typically these electrical/electronic systems are installed in sealed enclosures making thermal overrun temperatures one of the leading causes of failure and reduction in MTBF. The removal of heat generated by these advanced electronics systems has grown to be a critical issue since these systems must often perform in high ambient temperature environments.
In addition, many of these systems utilize rack mounted electronics that were originally designed for operation in air conditioned buildings, not in harsh petrochemical environments. These rack mounted systems are now being installed both indoors and outdoors in enclosures that are exposed to ambient temperatures up to 120° F and in some cases much higher. In addition to extreme temperatures, these sensitive electronic systems are also subject to the dust, dirt, moisture, corrosion, and vibration typical of the harsh conditions found in petrochemical environments.
The EIC Solution
In order to effectively solve these complex cooling problems, designers and engineers are turning to EIC’s thermoelectric cooling systems as an ideal solution when a low to moderate amount of heat must be handled in a harsh environment. Using patented solid-state technology to accomplish temperature change, EIC’s thermoelectric coolers eliminate the need for refrigerants and operate with fewer moving parts. They can cool enclosures to temperatures below ambient conditions while producing little noise and vibration.
Featuring reliability and a long life span coupled with flexible input power requirements and mounting arrangements, EIC’s thermoelectric air conditioners offer significant advantages over conventional cooling methods such as compressor-based systems. In addition, they are ideal solutions for applications where the cooling system must be portable or subjected to motion.
To provide a complete solution, EIC offers packaged systems comprised of enclosures and cabinets with integrated cooling assemblies. These systems are designed to protect and cool electrical/electronic systems in a wide range of petrochemical applications including instrumentation and process control systems. These integrated cooling systems offer superior performance with excellent temperature uniformity, resulting in lower electronic component temperatures, increased operational life and reliability (MTBF).
Additionally, the compact size and weight of EIC’s thermoelectric coolers allows them to fit a wide range electronic enclosures, electrical cabinets and sub-racks. Standard product modifications are also available to meet customers’ exact needs such as custom sizes, doors, holes, cutouts, colors and accessories to reduce assembly time, and for easy integration into new or existing systems.
With the rugged stainless steel construction, reliable performance and flexibility these advanced thermoelectric systems offer, designers can reduce equipment size, weight, and power with improved cooling, corrosion resistance and hazardous location protection. Whether the application requires an off-the-shelf or custom system, EIC’s engineers will help find the solution to best meet your cooling needs.
CLICK HERE for our Oil & Gas Applications Sheet. Need help sizing your application? Download sizing guide.
The following examples highlight the wide range of applications, environments, and clients who rely on our enclosures and cooling systems to safeguard their critical electronics:
Additional applications of EIC’s products can be found in many oil, gas and petrochemical related settings, including:
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