A Modeling Tool to Analyze the Performance of Industrial Cooling Towers

Conference · Mon Nov 01 04:00:00 EDT 2021

OSTI ID:1831608

Hooper, Josh ^[1]; Languri, Ethan ^[1]; Cunningham, Glenn ^[1]; Guo, Wei ^[2]

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1. Tennessee Technological University (TTU)
2. ORNL

Energy efficiency and energy savings have become an important factor as industries look for ways to save energy and minimize their energy consumption while reducing their carbon footprint. Cooling towers are utilized significantly in industries for either serving chillers or process cooling. Depending on the size of the cooling tower, it can use a surprising amount of energy and water, which is why it is crucial to make sure that the facility has optimized their cooling tower.A modeling tool has been developed to perform a thorough analysis of a cooling tower and its various operations to ensure that the facility has optimized its cooling tower. This model analyzes an annual base case in comparison with the revised case of a cooling tower operation. This modeling tool simulates 8,760 hourly calculations for fan power for various fan controls, water consumption, and pumping energy consumption and demand based on the user’s location and its corresponding Typical Meteorological Year 3 (TMY3) weather data. This model is capable to simulate up to five cooling tower cells as one large tower utilizing one pump or parallel pumping. The successful validated cooling tower model should assist industry to save energy at their facility through their cooling tower, whether they use it for process cooling or heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) applications. The entering/leaving water temperatures based on a monthly operating schedule or a wet-bulb temperature schedule will be used as inputs, and the model can calculate savings in energy for various conditions including variable-frequency drive (VFD) on the fan/pump, drift eliminators, number of cycles of concentration, reduced water flow rate, etc.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE; USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1831608
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English