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.

Applying Neural Network in Evaporative Cooler Performance Prediction

The back-propagation （BP） neural network is created to predict the performance of a direct evaporative cooling （DEC） air conditioner with GLASdek pads. The experiment data about the performance of the DEC air conditioner are obtained. Some experiment data are used to train the network until these data can approximate a function, then, simulate the network with the remanent data. The predicted result shows satisfying effects.

An on-chip electroosmotic micropump with a light-addressable potentiometric sensor

An on-chip electroosmotic(EO) micropump(EOP) was integrated in a microfluidic channel combined with a light-addressable potentiometric sensor(LAPS). The movement of EO flow towards right and left directions can be clearly observed in the microfluidic channel. The characteristics of photocurrent-time and photocurrent-bias voltage are obtained when buffer solution passes through the sensing region. The results demonstrate that the combination of an on-chip EOP with an LAPS is feasible.

Spatial-temporal variation characteristics of global evaporation revealed by eight reanalyses

On the basis of eight atmospheric reanalyses, we analyzed the spatial-temporal characteristics of global evaporation and also briefly evaluated the eight reanalyses. The results indicate that the long-term mean annual evaporation obtained from different reanalyses are consistent over most regions, with significant maritime-continental contrasts, as well as differences in meridional directions, and the land evaporation generally decreases with the increase of altitude. In addition, the temporal evolution of global evaporation varies significantly among the datasets, MERRA, ERA-Interim, NCEP-NCRA, and NCEP-DOE are very similar, whereas CFSR agrees best with ERA-40. Comparison of the inter-annual to inter-decadal variability of land evaporation reveals large differences among the reanalyses, whereas MERRA, CFSR, and NCEP-DOE are exactly similar. The temporal variation of evaporation over the oceans showed a relatively high consistency, which indicates that the quality of the reconstructed evaporation values over the oceans is higher, and even greater uncertainties lie in the estimates of evaporation over the land. In general, MERRA and NCEP-DOE may appropriately reflect the spatial-temporal characteristics of global evaporation, showing strong representativeness. The CFSR and ERA-40 are capable of revealing the characteristics of land evaporation, whereas ERA-Interim, NCEP-NCAR, OAFlux, and HOAPS are relatively applicable for research focused on the evaporation over the oceans. According to ERA-40, NCEP-NCAR, and OAFlux, global evaporation significantly decreased for the period of 1958–1978. In contrast, most of the eight reanalyses show a significant linear increase for the period of 1979–2011, and evaporation over the oceans was even more pronounced. Furthermore, the results are presented for the mean annual cycle of global evaporation, the changes at the low latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere are most distinct, and the monthly variation amplitude of the land evaporation was higher than that of the evaporation over the oceans.