Cooling Tower Design - Odd Indeed

I remember reading about that design somewhere, but fo rthe life of me I can't remember when or what publication it was in.

Betomachine,

The tower as described sounds very much like a Hybrid Tower.

These are supposed to run as Air Cooled Radiator type towers for 80% of the time.

The water is supposed to only run when ambient gets above a certain point and heat rejection slows down. To bring the heat rejection back to requirements.

I could be wrong, but that is what it sounds like.

Might pay to check to operational parameters of the tower!?!

Regards,
Sapper.

These are old designs (50 years) used to call it sepentine coolers.Last I have seen was in the older byprouct section of Coke Ovens.Bhilai Steel Plant India.Now it is a 6 million ton plant but when first installed in 1958 it was a 1 million ton plant built with Russian technology.Very simple with good access and easy to inspect and clean if you treat the cooling water well.

S.Ghosh s.n_ghosh@yahoo.com

This is a very typical tower used to cool the condenser water on a Heat Pump loop, and this type of tower is a closed loop system. It has been mostly replaced with a ground loop system, at least for heat pumps. You can usually spot them because they kind of look like mini nuclear tower cooling towers.

That type of tower was very popular in the 80's. I remember doing a very unusual tower design. We installed it in a dorm full of engineering students. One of their classes was to design AC for their dorm but to use as little electricity as possible, it was an old dorm and a very limited electrical load in the building. They designed a HP system. It was the 80's and we did a lot of load shedding back in those days, and the HP's were perfect for that. Not only did we get a break from the electrical company for limiting our amp draw but we needed to limit the amp draw on each circuit so as not to blow anything. But they designed their own cooling tower. It was really cool because they used common household items. Like sprinklers for spray heads. And the tower itself was built into a shed. I can't remember what the heat exchanger looked like. They used fans that they had scavenged out of some old DX condensing units. But what I always loved about this tower was the dampers. They didn't have any money but they needed to close the shed on cool days. So they used garage doors and door openers. My company was contracted to do the DDC system, . And I was teaching the students how to program their system. We had a very complicated staging system for this tower. because it was computer controlled. The students could find the best sequence that gave them the biggest energy savings. We could open each garage door separately, intake and exhaust. We could turn on the spray pump and turn on each fan separately. There were times when we might only turn on the spray pump. We would leave the doors closed and the fans off but could get enough cooling with the sprinklers. :-)

It was the most fun I have ever had on a construction project. You never knew what bizarre idea these students would have next. It was the biggest practical student engineering project I have ever seen and those students learned more practical engineering then most practicing engineers know.

It was common in old sulphuric acid plants to cool the acid of the dryer column and the absorption column in serpentine and trombon heat exchangers over which a distribution trays supplied water of a cooling tower directly over the tubes carrying the acid inside. They were very efficient but were substituted by plate heat exchanger because of leaks which provoked the presence of the acid in the water with a sudden decrease of pH and corrosion in circulating pumps. The material used to be cast iron.

Another problem was the scale over the external surface due to the direct evaporation.