Jan. 12, 2011

Mayekawa strives for the ultimate "Eco Arena"

Mayekawa has taken a holistic approach to developing the ultimate environmentally friendly ice arena including engineering of the buildings, refrigeration systems, lighting and air conditioning.

Coined the "Eco Arena", Mayekawa is striving to provide a low energy and environmentally friendly building, maintenance solution and refrigeration system management, at the same time delivering an uncompromised competition-grade skating experience.

Mayekawa's research and development engineers have partnered with local ice rink installation and management experts in Karuizawa City (Nagano, Japan) to verify the quality of the Eco Arena ice under various climatic and equipment conditions.

Mayekawa has harnessed the power of its NewTon3000 cold storage technology to develop a newly NH₃/CO₂ cooling system , a purpose built ice-rinks system featuring HCFC/HFC-free compressors.

Using liquid CO₂ as a secondary refrigerant for ice-making enables Mayekawa to drastically reduce the power needed to pump refrigerant to the condenser tubes.This stabilizes the temperature of all the condenser tubes, not possible using a thermosyphon system, improving the overall quality of the arena surface.

Further energy savings are possible by cooling the CO₂ naturally when lower ambient temperatures are available, reducing compressor usage.