Get To Understand Cooling Towers
The Large and centralized AC systems need the power of heat rejection to the outside area of the building. This process of heat rejection is obtained with the help of a cooling tower. A cooling tower is a special kind of device that is able to reject heat to the atmosphere by the cooling process of a working fluid, mainly water, to a lower temperature.
A Cooling tower can be found on the top of the large building that has a centralized HAVC system. If a building possesses a water-cooled chiller, then it can be possible that it has a cooling tower in its outside area. Cooling towers can also be seen on the ground behind those buildings where there is enough space.
So, in short, the cooling tower is a special heat removal device that uses water to transfer the heat from indoor to outdoor.
What is the Purpose Of a Cooling Tower, and How It Works?
Purpose of Cooling Tower
A cooling tower is very useful in cool down water and also is a great heat exchanger, expelling the heat of the building into the atmosphere and returning the colder water to the chiller. A cooling tower collects warm water from the chiller. This warm water is called condenser water because it can get heated in the condenser of the chiller. The work of a cooling tower is to cool down the water. Thus it can easily return to the chiller to receive more heat.
How Does It Work?
Near about all types of air conditioning equipment and the other types of industrial processes can easily generate heat in the form of hot water that is required. That’s where a cooling tower can help you out. The overheated water flows through the cooling tower, where it is circulated again and exposed to cool and dry air. Heat can re-circulate through cooling tower water through the process of evaporation.
When the condenser that is already warm goes into the cooling tower, the water gets passed through those nozzles, which are sprinkled into small droplets across the fill, thus increasing the surface area of water and helping for a good amount of heat loss via the process of greater evaporation. The job of the fan located on the top of the cooling tower is to collect air from the bottom of the tower and then move it up in the opposite direction of the warm condenser water. Then, the air will be able to carry the heat through the process of evaporating water from the device into the atmosphere.
The Components of a Cooling Tower
A cooling tower has some different types of components; some of those are:
Coil for Heat Exchanger
The cooling towers, which are closed-loop, have a special type of coil through which the working fluid flows. The job of the coil is to cool down the working fluid that is flowing through the condenser.
The fan
The Mechanical draft cooling towers have these fans. The task of the cooling tower fan is to induce a draft through the cooling tower to transfer heat.
Fill
In the cooling tower that is an open loop, fill in the main surface which facilitates the heat transfer from water to air.
The Water Treatment System
The water treatment system is used to remove the minerals from the water to prevent the problems of scaling and fouling on the cooling tower.
The Drift Eliminator
Drift eliminators are installed mainly on the perimeter of a cooling tower, around the fill. The task of the drift eliminator is to reduce the loss of the cool working fluid to hot air in the atmosphere.
So, in a nutshell, the cooling tower is a very useful device for those buildings that have large and centralized ACs.