INVESTIGATION OF FLOW CHARACTERISTICS OF HELLER-TYPE COOLING TOWERS WITH DIFFERENT COOLING DELTA ANGLES

Abstract

In the Heller-type dry cooling towers, the heat exchangers are arranged circumferentially at the bottom of the cooling tower. Two cooling columns constitute a cooling delta, in which the cooling columns represent two sides of a three-sided prism, and the third side of this prism is equipped with louvers in order to control the air flow through the cooling delta. The angle between the cooling columns within a cooling delta is called cooling delta angle. The cooling delta angle affects the flow pattern through the heat exchangers, and thereby influences the thermal and economic parameters of the cooling tower, too. The aim of this article is to summarise the investigation of the flow characteristics of cooling deltas with different delta angles. The analyses are based on FLUENT 5.5, a Computational Fluid Dynamics software. Four cooling delta angles were investigated using two-dimensional computational models, and in each case the air side pressure drop was also altered in order to model cooling columns with different depths.