PREDICTION OF THE THERMAL BEHAVIOR OF CROSS FLOW WET COOLING TOWERS IN AHVAZ CLIMATE

Cooling towers are widely used in most industrial units to reject waste heat to environment . wet towers are usually designed to operate in hot and dry weather conditions, but wet cooling towers operating in Ahvaz climate suffer from a mixed weather condition that strongly affects the thermal performance of the towers. Operating in a mixed weather condition in conjugation with fouling on fills are two major concerns for the tower working in the Direct Reduction Unit of Khuzestan Steel Company (K.S.C) . two conventional mathematical models are used to predict the thermal behavior of the tower and the results of the models for the outlet water temperature in nine various operating conditions are compared with experimental data. Prevailing fill characteristic curves for three cell halves of the tower are obtained using a numerical-experimental method. The results of the models show that the traditional Merkel’s model gives reasonable results regardless of the value of flow ratio (FR). The effect of placing an impact separator on front of air louvers to reduce the suspended solids of the air on thermal performance of the tower in investigated.

Keywords:

Mixed weather condition , Fouling , Fill characteristic , Mathematical model , Impact separator