Experimental Study on the Resistance and Splash Performances of Water Collecting Devices for Mechanical Draft Cooling Towers

In recent years,water collecting systems,with the associated advantages of energy saving and noise reduction,have become the foundation for the development of a scheme to optimize the structure of cooling towers.To explore the feasibility of this approach for mechanical draft cooling towers,a small-scale experimental device has been built to study the resistance and splash performances of three U-type water collecting devices(WCDs)for different water flow rates and wind speeds.The experimental results show that within the considered ranges of wind speed and water flow rate,the pressure drop of the different WCDs can vary significantly.The resistance and local splash performances can also be remarkably different.Some recommendations about the most suitable system are provided.Moreover,a regression analysis of the experimental data is conducted,and the resulting fitting formulas for resistance and splash performance of WCD are reported.

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.

A New Water Saving Device of Swirling Flow for Cooling Towers

This paper is concerned with water saving for water-loop cooling tower system in power plants. A newly developed water saving device of swirling flow is presented. The key point is that the new water saving device makes the steam swirl up along the device wall rather than engender laminar flow in a corrugated plate. The corrugated plate device can save approximately 10 percent of the total lost water. In contrast to the scale model of corrugated plate water saving device, experimental analyses have demonstrated that the new water saving device of swirling flow is more efficient, with a capacity of saving more than 20 percent of water.

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.

A Novel Approach for Energy and Water Conservation by Using Silver-Carbon Quantum Dots Hybrid Nanofluids in Wet Cooling Towers Systems

This study presents the use of Silver-Carbon Quantum Dots(Ag-CQD)hybrid nanofluids,prepared by a facile wet chemical method,for heat transfer enhancement of wet cooling towers systems.The samples were characterized using different analyses,including FT-IR,XRD and TEM.After synthesizing the CQD,it was hybridized with silver nanoparticles and dispersed in water,using ultrasonic probe.The viscosity and density of the prepared nanofluid were investigated as a function of temperature and nanoparticles concentration,which demonstrated that there were no noticeable changes at lower particles concentration.Then,thermal conductivity and convective heat transfer coefficient were measured to evaluate the heat transfer enhancement of the nanofluid.At 45℃ and 0.5 wt%,the most significant thermal conductivity improvement compared to the base fluid was 24%;and 28%enhancement of the heat transfer coefficient was obtained at Reynolds number of 15529.The nanofluid performance was evaluated in a wet cooling tower for investigating the efficiency and water consumption rate.The results indicated that the efficiency of the cooling tower,by applying Ag-CQD nanofluid,enhanced from 23.72%to 28.23%;consequently,the amount of the consumed water decreased from 80.76 mL·min^(−1)to 69.67 mL·min^(−1).The results proved that the prepared nanofluid is a successful and promising candidate to enhance heat transfer.

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.

Evaporative Cooling Applied in Thermal Power Plants:A Review of the State-ofthe-Art and Typical Case Studies

A review is conducted about the application of the evaporative cooling technology in thermal power plants.Different case studies are considered,namely,evaporative air conditioners,evaporative cooling in direct air-cooled systems,gas turbine inlet cooling,wet cooling towers,and hybrid cooling towers with a crosswind effect.Some effort is provided to describe the advantages related to direct evaporative cooling when it is applied in thermal power plants and illustrate the research gaps,which have not been filled yet.In particular,typical case studies are intentionally used to compare the cooling performances when direct evaporative cooling is implemented in different types of cooling towers,including the natural draft wet cooling tower(NDWCT)and the pre-cooled natural draft dry cooling tower(NDDCT).It is shown that the NDWCT provides the best cooling performance in terms of power station cooling,followed by the pre-cooled NDDCT,and the NDDCT;moreover,the evaporative pre-cooling is able to enhance the cooling performance of NDDCT.Besides,on a yearly basis,better NDDCT cooling performances can be obtained by means of a spray-based pre-cooling approach with respect to wet media pre-cooling.Therefore,the use of nozzle spray is suggested for improvement in the performance of indirect/direct air-cooling systems with controlled water consumption.

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.

Collapse Simulation and Response Assessment of a Large Cooling Tower Subjected to Strong Earthquake Ground Motions

Large cooling towers in thermal power plants and nuclear power plants are likely to suffer from strong earthquakes during service periods.The resulting destructions of the cooling towers would endanger the power plants and threaten the security of the related areas.It is important to use effective means to evaluate the safety status of the cooling towers and guide further precautions as well as retrofitting efforts.This paper is therefore focused on an elaborate numerical investigation to the earthquake-induced collapses of a large cooling tower structure.A complete numerical work for simulation of material failure,component fracture,structural buckling and system collapse is presented by integrating the stochastic damage constitutive model of concrete,refined structural element models,and some other key techniques.Numerical results indicate that the damage behavior and collapse mode of the cooling tower are affected notably by the randomness specification of ground motions.The collapse mechanisms of the cooling tower are studied from the energy absorption and dissipation points of view.An effective energy-based criterion is introduced to identify the collapse of the cooling tower under ground motion excitations.While distinct collapse modes are observed,the collapse criterion can predict well the damage and failure of the cooling tower.The proposed methodology is vital to better understanding the disastrous mechanisms and potential failure paths in optimal design of the cooling towers to ensure safety.

BUCKLING OF COOLING TOWER SHELLS WITH RING-STIFFENERS

With the stability analysis of hyperbolic cooling tower shells with ring-stiffeners. our paper proposes the linear pre-buckling consistent theory. The numerical result shows that this linear analysis method is very effective and practical in engineering, for its precision of compulation is up to the level of the nonlinear analysis when it is used for the study of critical loads of the hyperbolic cooling tower which is mainly governed by wind pressure and for the study of the effect of some oilier factors concerned in design on the buckling of shells. Based on that, we have obtained a scries of conclusions whicii will greatly benefits the engineering design when discussing the effect on the critical windloading of the shell which is caused by the following factors such as the position of rings, the number of rings and the dead weight.

NONLINEAR BUCKLING ANALYSIS OF HYPERBOLIC COOLING TOWER SHELL WITH RING-STIFFENERS

This paper is concerned with a numerical solution of hyperbolic cooling tower shell, a class of full nonlinear problems in solid mechanics of considerable interest in engineering applications. In this analysis, the post-buckling analysis of cooling tower shell with discrete fixed support and under the action of wind loads and dead load is studied. The influences of ring-stiffener on instability load are also discussed. In addition, a new solution procedure for nonlinear problems which is the combination of load increment iteration with modified R-C are-length method is suggested. Finally, some conclusions having important significance for practice engineering are given.

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

Model free optimization of building cooling water systems with refined action space

Deep Q Network(DQN)is an efficient model-free optimization method,and has the potential to be used in building cooling water systems.However,due to the high dimension of actions,this method requires a complex neural network.Therefore,both the required number of training samples and the length of convergence period are barriers for real application.Furthermore,penalty function based exploration may lead to unsafe actions,causing the application of this optimization method even more difficult.To solve these problems,an approach to limit the action space within a safe area is proposed in this paper.First of all,the action space for cooling towers and pumps are separated into two sub-regions.Secondly,for each type of equipment,the action space is further divided into safe and unsafe regions.As a result,the convergence speed is significantly improved.Compared with the traditional DQN method in a simulation environment validated by real data,the proposed method is able to save the convergence time by 1 episode(one cooling season).The results in this paper suggest that,the proposed DQN method can achieve a much quicker learning speed without any undesired consequences,and therefore is more suitable to be used in projects without pre-learning stage.

THREE-DIMENSIONAL REGULARITIES OF DISTRIBUTION OF AIR-INLET CHARACTERISTIC VELOCITY IN NATURAL-DRAFT WET COOLING TOWER

A model for heat and mass transfer in a natural-draft wet cooling tower was established. Numerical simulation with the κ-ε turbulent model was conducted. Distribution rules of air inlet aerodynamic field were studied. Field experiments were done in a cooling tower in power plant, and the test data was compared with the related results. The definition of characteristic air velocity was proposed and its influencing factors, such as the cross-wind velocity and circumferential angle, were quantitatively studied. It can be used to evaluate the performance of cooling tower and to calculate the ventilation quantity and resistance of air inlet. It is also a theoretical basis for cooling tower design and performance optimization.

NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF FLOW FIELDS IN A NATURAL DRAFT WET-COOLING TOWER

The flow field in the hyperbolic natural draft wet-cooling tower, which has great effects on the economy and security of power plant, was studied through numerical simulation. The mathematical model was established and analyzed in order to optimize the cooling-tower and to evaluate its efficiency. Various working conditions were considered and compared with each other, such as the circulating water flux, air temperature and tower resistance. It is concluded that when the cooling-tower runs without wind, there is a vacuum region inside the tower and the pressure rises with the increase of the tower height. Meanwhile, the inner flow field is axisymmetrical. The air velocity achieves its climax at the axis. It is also found that the effect of circulating water temperature is equivalent to that of the water flux.

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.