Design Analysis and Fabrication of Cooling Tower Using Different Packing Materials

A cooling tower is a heat and mass transfer device commonly used to dissipate waste heat from devices like condensers in power plants, compressors, pumps in industries. Cooling tower works on the principle of evaporative cooling in which sensible heat of water is given to air result in an increase in the latent heat of air. It offers an effective alternative at locations where there is cooling water scarcity and where hot water discharge causes an environmental concern. The effective cooling of water depends on various process parameters like a dry bulb and wet bulb temperature of the air, fill material and its size, inlet air flow rate, air inlet angles, water flow rate, and temperature, etc. The present paper is a detailed analysis of the counter flow cooling tower by changing the packing material. Considering a common application to design a simple evaporative- counterflow cooling tower. The cooling tower is then modeled in Solidworks. The approach of this project is to check the effect of change in packing material over the effectiveness and range of the cooling tower. The experimental setup of the physical model of the cooling tower is to be analyzed to study the real-time effect. All the required data is taken from the Steam table by R.S. Khurmi and S. Chand and Refrigeration and psychrometric properties handbook by M. L. Mathur and F. S. Mehta.