Cooling towers used to cool condensers of water cooled chillers in the Arabian Gulf area become inefficient when the ambient temperature and humidity rise up in summer. What can be done to improve the performance of cooling towers?
If not already buit-in, some efficiency gain can be achieved by extra adiabatic cooling of the entrance air under such ambient conditions, before the gasstream reaches the condensor unit. Extra cooling is achieved by evaporating droplets on the hotter condenser surface. It can be done by spraying very fine droplets of about 100 µm in the gasstream by special nozzles. The final efficiency gain may be relatively low though, about 10-20%.
Dear Marcel
Thanks for your contribution. The condenser unit in a water cooled chiller is a shell-and-tube type and usually istalled in buildings basements where there is no way for spraying droplets. The hot water of the condenser is pumped up to be cooled in the cooling tower where it is cooled adiabatically by evaporative cooling. The problem is that the ambient conditions in summer are worse in summer. The dry bulb and wet bulb temperatures are high and evaporative cooling in the cooling tower becomes ineffective and hence performance drops. Is there any way to dry the humid inlet air to drop its relative humidity before entering the tower ?
Hello Kamal,
I had similar problem with the humidity due to continuous rainy weather. And running only the air-conditioner was not helping a scientific instrument to improve its performance. What we used was to use an AIR DE-HUMIDIFIER which is like an AIR DRYER that circulates the air through a heater arrangement. Therefore, I can suggest in your requirement as to introduce some sort of heating arrangement at the inlets at the tower entry to dry the air. I hope you shall find this idea appealing and justifiable.
Wish you success in your efforts!
Dear Prasanna
I do not think heating of the air at entry will solve the problem as this will shift the dry bulb temperature to the right in the psychrometric chart and it will render less cooling effect in addition to the implied consumption of energy involved in the presumed heating of inlet air.
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