Estimation of Cooling Capacity of Reagent-Free Evaporative Cooling Tower

This paper deals with the study of circulating water cooling processes in evaporative cooling towers with various filler units, widely used at TPPs and in chemical, petrochemical, oil & gas processing industries. The process flow diagram and design of cooling tower with closed cooling water are proposed in this paper by the authors that allow to reduce significantly the amount of chemical reagents to be used. The authors studied the design, consisting of developed jet-film contact elements, as a cooling tower filler unit. The proposed checker fillings can provide a large surface area of phase contact with a small number of irrigation points, a minimum percentage of liquid drops entrainment by the gas flow and a low hydraulic resistance. Based on the Lewis analogy, an equation to calculate the volumetric heat transfer coefficient, taking into account the ratio of mass flow rates of air and water, as well as the irrigation density, was obtained. It was found that the volumetric heat transfer coefficient increases with an increase in the irrigation density due to the turbulence of flowing down liquid film. The comparative results of calculations of volumetric heat transfer coefficient and the Merkel number for different cooling tower filler units are shown in this paper. It is proved that the proposed jet-film contact elements have the greatest cooling capacity among the studied checker fillings.