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Cooling Towers Design Training
Cooling Towers Design Training
RATHISH K
COOLING TOWERS
•What is a cooling tower ?
•Why cooling towers are used ?
•Where it is used ?
•How it works ?
•What are the different types available ?
•How to size a cooling tower ?
•How to select a cooling tower ?
•What about the cooling tower piping ?
•Where to place a cooling tower ?
•Why water treatment is required ?
•What are the relevant codes ?
What is a cooling tower ?
Cooling towers are heat exchangers that are used to dissipate large
heat loads to the atmosphere.
Why cooling towers should be used ??
Water is the most efficient way of dissipating unwanted heat. The most
commercial buildings and industries use water to cool their HVAC and
process machinery. A cooling tower is the most important piece of
equipment in any industry whose primary purpose is to remove heat
while minimizing water usage.
The amount of water consumed for cooling varies with the type of
cooling system employed.
Once Through System – The cooling water passes through the heat
exchange equipment only once. Water is simply drawn from estuary,
lake or river to the process equipment / heat exchange equipment and
discharged back to river. This system is used where large volume of
cooling water is required and where the water is available in
abundance.
What if abundant water is not available ???
There are many options available…..
Dry towers or closed re-circulation system use the same cooling water
repeatedly in a continuous cycle. No direct contact of water with air.
Consumes little water but very costly to construct since mass flow rates
associated a quite high.
Wet towers provide direct contact between the cooling water and air
passing through the tower. These towers rely on the latent heat
of evaporation to exchange heat between the process and the air
passing through the tower.
Hybrid towers add heat to the airflow prior to discharge through the
cooling tower fan stack to eliminate any visible plume.
Schematic of a dry cooling tower
Wet cooling tower
Spray Tree
Its function is to distribute water over the wet deck fill.Nozzles
mounted on the spray tree provide the water sprays to wet the
fill.Uniform water distribution at the top of the fill is essential to
achieve proper wetting of the entire fill surface.
Cold water basins
Its function is to collect cooled water at the bottom of the tower.They
are an integral part of factory-assembled designs and are built in
place-typically of concrete-for field erected towers.The cold-water
basin located at or near the bottom of the tower.
Air inlet screens
It’s the point of entry for air entering a tower.The inlet may take up an
entire side of a tower(cross flow design) or be located low on the side
or the bottom(counter flow designs).
Ladders and handrails
They are necessary for large field erected cooling towers and make
sense on some factory assembled designs.
Fans
They provide the airflow for mechanical draft cooling towers.Generally
propeller fans are used on induced draft towers.Both propeller and
centrifugal fans are found on forced draft models.Automatic pitch
blades can vary airflow in response to changing load conditions.
How can we size the cooling tower ?
The heat load, range, approach, and WBT affect the cooling tower
size.We shall see when 3 of these 4 quantities are held constant,
tower size varies as follows.
Heat Load
To select a cooling tower, the water flow rate, water inlet temperature,
water outlet temperature and ambient wet bulb temperatures must be
known.
When selecting the cooling tower,one must determine the design heat
rejection load along with the design WBT for the geographical area and
desired range.Water flow is determined by the heat load and range.
The total dissolved solids (TDS) of the circulating water is not allowed
exceeding 2500 ppm. So that the corrosion and scaling problems are
kept under control. Let the TDS of makeup water be 800 ppm.
Then the system is not allowed to operate more than 2500/800=3.1
cycles of operation.
It will be of use to examine the water balance of the system
Make up water (M)=water lost { through evaporation(V) + bleed(B) +
drift (D) }
Ignoring drift losses, We have M=V+B
In order to keep off from making scale, all of the solids that enter as
make-up must exit as bleed
Therefore M=cycles x B
So we get bleed B =V/(cycles-1)
As a piping person these information will help us to perform makeup
water line sizing/bleed line sizing.Here in IDEA we will get these
information from PPE dept.
What are the relevant codes/standards that I should refer ?