Airedale by Modine expands its service offerings in the US

Author: Isha Jain

A five megawatts testing laboratory has been recently commissioned at the Modine Rockbridge facility in Virginia, further expanding the services that Airedale by Modine can offer its data centre customers and meet increasing demand from the data centre industry for validated and sustainable cooling solutions.

Airedale is a trusted brand of Modine and provides complete cooling solutions to industries where removing heat is mission critical. Its facility opened in 2022 to manufacture chillers to meet the growing demand from US data centre customers.

The new lab can test a complete range of air conditioning equipment, accommodating air-cooled chillers up to 2.1MW and water-cooled chillers up to 5MW. Crucially for data centre applications, the ambient temperature inside the chamber can be reduced to prove chiller-free cooling performance.

Free cooling is the process of using external ambient temperature to reject heat, rather than using the refrigeration process. If used within an optimised system, it can help a data centre significantly reduce its energy consumption and carbon footprint. The lab also can facilitate quality witness tests for customers to validate chiller performance in person.

In addition, the first US based service team has been launched to provide ongoing support to data centre customers in the field. The team offers coverage for spare parts, planned maintenance and emergency response.

The facility is also working with colleges in Northern Virginia to recruit and train service engineers, either as new graduates who will receive fast-tracked training or through apprenticeships. Apprentices will have a mix of college classes and on-site training, after which they will graduate with an associate’s degree in engineering.

Rob Bedard, General Manager of Modine’s North America data centre business says, “Our ongoing investment in our people in the US and the launch of the service team and apprenticeship program, along with the opening of our 5MW chiller test centre allows us to better serve our customers and cement our continuing commitment to the US data centre industry.”