Editorial Article: The cool story behind this ‘game-changing’ new portable recirculating chiller

It’s not easy to make waves in a vast, longstanding industry such as temperature control, but that’s exactly what PolyScience has in mind with its innovative DuraChill^® portable recirculating chillers. Here, we meet company president Philip Preston to find out more about the story behind this state-of-the-art technology and the environmentally-friendly features that together make it PolyScience’s ‘crowning achievement’ — for the time being, at least.

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Philip Preston and his team discuss how to the make DuraChill^® as user-friendly as possible

SS: Your family business, PolyScience, based in Niles, Illinois, has been around for over 60 years. How did your family start his?

PP: My father founded the business. He was a very entrepreneurial guy and found his niche in liquid temperature control. He was always moving on to new things, starting magazines in chromatography, toxicology, photography, chemical business. I took over the PolyScience side of the business back in 1982.

SS: How does it feel to see your products fueling some of the biggest industries out there?

PP: It’s extremely diverse because liquid temperature control is touching your life throughout your entire day. We are involved in CAT scan cooling, laser cooling, electron microscopes, analytical instrumentation, general lab equipment even if you just have to incubate samples, biological samples, you’ll need temperature control equipment. We’ve also gotten into a lot of very fun emerging markets. Most recently we’re engaged in the cannabis extraction market.

SS: As a family-based company, you don’t have as many restrictions in terms of research and development of new products, which has got to be liberating for you. How is that as a creator?

PP: That’s actually one of the reasons why I love doing what I do, because we’re not constrained as typical companies are with return on investment, you know, ‘I’ve got to have a payoff in one or two years.’ We get to play a long game, and it’s a lot more fun.It gives us the ability to be a lot more creative and explore things that other companies couldn’t. What comes out of it is this, this quest to really create the absolute best piece of equipment. We’ve developed this reputation for an extremely high level of quality because it’s not just my reputation riding on that, it’s our customer’s reputation.

SS: PolyScience has launched DuraChill^®. What makes it so different?

PP: The DuraChill^® line represents what we believe is the game-changer in this world of precise temperature control and portable chillers in that we’ve brought in all of the features that we could come up with that represent environmental considerations, such as reduction of refrigerant gas and preparing these units for the introduction of new refrigerants that will be even more globally responsible.

SS: Tell us more about what makes the innovations inside of DuraChill^® unique but also beneficial to consumers

PP: One of the many things we want to look at is what’s going to give that customer the best possible experience and then develop the technology to do that. One example would be a self changing filter, that changes itself for up to two years.  We also have a patented UV light system, that will continuously prevent biological growth on the fluid path, without the need for chemical growth inhibitors. We also designed and patented the WhisperCool noise reduction system that makes our chillers a lot more pleasant to be around because we slow the fan speed to the minimum necessary to fulfill the needs of the application. A lot of times our chiller is sitting next to you and you barely even notice that it’s running.

We added a front-fill reservoir to meet the needs of installers of the equipment to make their life a lot easier with that simple ability to fill the reservoir from the front.

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“Changing the world of chillers forever" is more than just a catchphrase for Preston and the team that created DuraChill^®

One of the added features, that’s tied into that front-fill reservoir, is a new system we developed for capacitance liquid level sensing of the reservoir. It’s more like a fuel gauge on the display showing you the liquid level that’s in the chiller which can prevent low liquid level, damage to pump seals and it has also eliminated the less than reliable float switch systems that had been used since the ‘60s.

DuraChill^® is our crowning achievement, for the moment, we have many new products and innovations that we are ready to release in 2020 and beyond. I always encourage people to go to our website, research the spec sheets, read more about our new innovations and find out how we can help them with their goals.

Find out more about DuraChill^® Recirculating Chillers from PolyScience >>