NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE ADVERSE EFFECT OF WIND ON THE HEAT TRANSFER PERFORMANCE OF TWO NATURAL DRAFT COOLING TOWERS IN TANDEM ARRANGEMENT

This article reports the findings on the adverse effect of the crosswind on the performance of natural draft cooling towers through numerical computation with the k-epsilon eddy-viscosity turbulence model. It is observed here that the cause of the adverse effect of the crosswind on the cooling towers call be attributed to the around flow effect which destroys the radial inflow into the cooling towers when the wind is absent. Hence, a significant deterioration in the heat transfer from the heat exchangers at lateral sides occurs.

STUDY ON THE AIRFLOW RESISTANCE IN NATURAL DRAFT COOLING TOWERS

A new approach for improving the calculation of the airflow resistance coefficient of natural draft cooling towers from the inlet to throat (4) has been presented in this paper. The suggested equations areWhere. ζ1 is the coefficient of the airflow resistance with no consideration of waterdrop in rain zone, ζ2 is the coefficient of the airflow resistance due to falling of waterdrop in rain zone, s is the rate of the inlet area to the area at elevation of the packing, q is the water loading, V0 air velocity at the packing section.

Spray Effect on the Thermal Performances of a Dry Cooling Tower

Pre-cooling the inlet air of a dry cooling tower by means of a spray can improve the tower performance during periods of high temperature.To study the spray effect on the thermal performance of natural draft dry cooling towers(NDDCTs),in this study 3-D numerical simulations of such a process have been conducted using Fluent 16.2(a two-way coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian approach).The considered NDDCT is 120 m high and only half system is simulated due to its structural symmetry.Three different spray strategies have been investigated at a typical crosswind speed of 4 m/s,which is the most frequent wind speed.The results have shown that:(1)The three implemented spray strategies can improve the thermal performance of the studied NDDCT with a vary-ing degree of success.In one case,the heat rejection rate can be increased by 35.2%,and the tower outlet water temperature can be decreased by 2.1℃ when compared with the no spray case;(2)To improve the thermal per-formance of the NDDCT using a small amount of water,the design of the spray pre-cooling system must include more nozzles on the windward and fewer or even no nozzles on the leeward sides of the NDDCT.

A decoupled method to identify affecting mechanism of crosswind on performance of a natural draft dry cooling tower

The natural draft dry cooling tower(NDDCT)has been increasingly used for cooling in power generation in arid area.As crosswind affects the performance of a NDDCT in a complicated way,and the basic affecting mechanism is unclear,attempts have been made to improve the performance of a NDDCT based on limited experiences.This paper introduces a decoupled method to study the complicated crosswind effects on the inlet and outlet of a NDDCT separately by computational fluid dynamics(CFD)modeling and hot state experiments.Accordingly,the basic affecting mechanism of crosswind on the NDDCT performance is identified.Crosswind changes the inlet flow field of a NDDCT and induces mainstream vortices inside the tower,so as to degrade the ventilation.Besides,low crosswind deflects the upward plume at the outlet to further degrade the ventilation,while high crosswind induces the low pressure area at the outlet to reduce the ventilation degradation.

Experimental Study of Effects of Cross Wind on Flow in Natural-draft Dry-cooling Towers

The effects of cross wind on the flow field in natural draft dry cooling towers are studied experimentally in a wind tunnel using similarity principles. Particular attention is focused on the flow fields inside the tower. The study illustrates the influence of wind on the cooling tower performance and proposes a number of techniques for improving tower performance with a cross wind

A Novel Approach for Energy Efficiency Prediction of Various Natural Draft Wet Cooling Towers Using ANN

Cooling tower is crucial equipment in the cool-end system of power plant and the natural draft counter-flow wet cooling tower(NDWCT)gets wide application.The artificial neural network(ANN)technique is becoming an effective method for the thermal performance investigation of cooling towers.However,the neural network research on the energy efficiency performance of NDWCTs is not sufficient.In this paper,a novel approach was proposed to predict energy efficiency of various NDWCTs by using Back Propagation(BP)neural network:Firstly,based on 638 sets of field test data within 36 diverse NDWCTs in power plant,a three-layer BP neural network model with structure of 8-14-2 was developed.Then the cooling number and evaporation loss of water of different NDWCTs were predicted adopting the BP model.The results show that the established BP neural network has preferable prediction accuracy for the heat and mass transfer performance of NDWCT with various scales.The predicted cooling number and evaporative loss proportion of the testing cooling towers are in good agreement with experimental values with the mean relative error in the range of 2.11%–4.45%and 1.04%–4.52%,respectively.Furthermore,the energy efficiency of different NDWCTs can also be predicted by the proposed BP model with consideration of evaporation loss of water in cooling tower.At last,a novel method for energy efficiency prediction of various NDWCTs using the developed ANN model was proposed.The energy efficiency index(EEI)of different NDWCTs can be achieved readily without measuring the temperature as well as velocity of the outlet air.