Experimental Analysis of the Performance of a Mechanical Geothermal Water Cooling Tower in South Tunisia

Abstract

The paper reports the results of pilot test on the cooling performance of a direct cross flow mechanical cooling tower located in the Kebili region in the southern part of Tunisia. In this study heat and mass transfer data are measured within the tower over a period of one year and compared with external weather data collected over the same period. The data enabled the influence of different weather conditions on the performance of the cooling tower to be analyzed. The results obtained show that ambient humidity has a greater influence on performance than external temperature. In fact, significantly better cooling performance of about 80% was obtained during the high temperature, low humidity summer months than during the winter period, less than 40%, with relatively low external temperature and high humidity. These results indicate the relative importance of evaporative cooling as compared to convective cooling. The effect of wind on cooling performance was found to be considerable but was confined to those periods when wind direction coincided with the orientation of the louvers of the tower. This was observed to occur only during the summer period when compared to winter period, thus attesting the benefits of the use of proper cooling tower design for improving efficiency and conserve energy.

Experimental study of cold inflow effect on a small natural draft dry cooling tower

“…No detailed full-scale experimental data was reported and the cooling tower performance hasn't been connected with the effect of the cold inflow. In fact, very few people paid attention to this phenomenon in the recent cooling tower research and it hasn't been mentioned in the recent cooling tower experimental research [20,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35].…”

Measurements of crosswind influence on a natural draft dry cooling tower for a solar thermal power plant

“…The experimental study of the off-design performance of the cooling tower is a very important preparation for the future design and operation [33][34][35]. However, most of previous full scale experimental studies of the crosswind effect didn't provide enough details, such as the detailed experimental data of wind direction, changes in ambient temperature, detailed heat exchanger temperature and the air temperature distribution within the cooling tower [9,14,[36][37][38]. On the other hand, the experiments on lab-scale cooling tower models can offer controlled conditions and reliable data, but most of the Reynolds numbers for such small towers are much lower than those for full scale towers, which may result in erroneous results [9,11,24,25,39].…”

Numerical and experimental study of small natural draft dry cooling tower for concentrating solar thermal power plant

“…The experimental study of the off-design performance of the cooling tower is a very important preparation for the future design and operation [134,135,158]. However, most of previous full scale experimental studies of the crosswind effect didn't provide enough details, such as the detailed experimental data of wind direction, changes in ambient temperature, detailed heat exchanger temperature and the air temperature distribution within the cooling tower [4,45,99,132,159]. On the other hand, the experiments on lab-scale cooling tower models can offer controlled conditions and reliable data, but most of the Reynolds numbers for such small towers are much lower than those for full scale towers, which may result in erroneous results [4,41,42,46,156].…”

“…No detailed full-scale experimental data was reported and the cooling tower performance hasn't been connected with the effect of the cold inflow. In fact, very few people paid attention to this phenomenon in the recent cooling tower research and it hasn't been mentioned in the recent cooling tower experimental research [41,42,45,99,109,132,159,169,176].…”