M. Damak
Infinite Cooling,
United States
Keywords: cooling, water savings, efficiency
Summary:
Industrial cooling is one of the biggest sources of freshwater consumption in the US, mostly through cooling towers. Cooling towers are vital components across industries like power generation, refineries, chemicals, data centers, and HVAC. They operate on the principle of evaporative cooling, where they evaporate large amounts of water to cool down a process heat load. The discharged water vapor partly condenses and forms visible plumes that can pose safety, reliability, and public relations issues. In this presentation, we show how cooling tower evaporation can be reduced while increasing efficiency through the monitoring of key parameters, targeted maintenance, and optimization. We also explain how cooling tower plumes form and quantify their impact on plants in terms of safety (low visibility and freezing) and efficiency (plume entrainment). We then present a novel plume capture technology that uses electric fields to collect the water content of cooling tower plumes, resulting in plume abatement and water savings. The technology relies on the generation of electrical charges in the cooling tower exhaust stream, which charge the water droplets in the plume and make them collect on oppositely charged porous collection surfaces. We show that plume abatement can be achieved at a relatively low capital cost and energy consumption compared to traditional plume abatement solutions. We also show that the recovered water has low conductivity and a low concentration of contaminants compared to the basin water and can therefore reduce water treatment costs or be used as feedwater for demineralized water production. We finally report experimental results from an installation on an operating power plant’s cooling tower.