Ever heard of a combi cooler? They are relatively new products in the mobile machinery world. A combi cooler, short for combination cooler, is a custom built “radiator” for mobile machines that includes multiple cores for cooling different media. Typically, a combi cooler might consist of an engine coolant radiator, charge air cooler and hydraulic oil cooler……all in one unit.
By selecting a custom combi cooler, you can actually optimize each section to give you maximum performance in the most compact size possible.
Why is that important? With today’s Tier 4 diesel engines, the amount of real estate occupied by the engine and all of its supporting emissions equipment has increased dramatically. Freeing up real estate on the machine has become a necessity for many machine designers. That’s where a combi cooler can come into play.
Combi Coolers Help Make Your Machine Cool
Once we’ve determined the heat rejection requirements of each system, our designers can take that information, along with available space dimensions, and design a cooler that will fit in your machine and keep each system operating at its desired temperature range in the most extreme environments.
Besides the combi cooler, you will need a fan system. Fan systems can be electrical
or hydraulic, depending on your machine’s requirements. The fan speed can be varied electronically for either type system and, by only running when needed, will only move the amount of air necessary to keep the systems cool at any given ambient temperature.
This results in faster warm ups and fuel savings over fixed speed, engine driven fans.
As an additional bonus, we can incorporate a “cleaning” cycle by reversing the fan rotation and blowing accumulated debris off the combi cooler. This works great for machines that operate in dusty environments.
Because we can implement hydraulic or electric fan systems, your combi cooler does not have to be mounted in the traditional “in front of the engine” position. Now, you can position it wherever it makes most sense for your application – on the side, on the top, down low, up high, in the rear, etc.
All you have to do is ensure that there is adequate air flow and the ability to exhaust the hot air to ambient.
Combi coolers are generally made from brazed aluminum materials which give you a great blend of efficiency, cost, and weight. Different style fins can be used and spaced at different intervals to provide either a very dense cooling package, rugged construction, or larger air passages to help resist clogging. In addition, since the cooler is unitized, you eliminate the chafing that you sometimes get when you stack coolers front to back.
Contact us at Cross Company Hydraulics and we can help you select the combi cooler that is right for your machine design. In the meantime, keep cool!
