Informations et ressources scientifiques
sur le développement des zones arides et semi-arides

Titre : The Effect of Wind on Multiple, Short, Natural-draft Dry Cooling Towers

Auteur : Khamooshi, Mehrdad

Université de soutenance : Auckland University of Technology

Grade : Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 2019

Résumé partiel
The deployment of concentrating solar thermal (CST) power plants in arid areas necessitates the use of dry cooling systems to reject heat from the condenser. Previous research has shown that the capacity of short natural draft dry cooling towers (NDDCTs), used as condensers for CST plants, can be significantly influenced by the prevailing wind condition. From the literature, it is apparent that there is a lack of work relating to how the interactions between multiple cooling towers during windy and no-wind conditions impact the cooling capacity of multiple cooling towers on a common site, and short NDDCTs in particular. This is a particular problem because as the capacity of CSP power plants is increased, additional cooling is required which necessitates the addition of more NDDCTs. When adding these cooling towers, there is a need to be able to position them correctly so that their performance as a group is maximised. To do this, an understanding of the effect they have on one another is needed. Hence, this work aims to characterise the interaction between multiple short NDDCTs on the cooling capacity of the multi-tower system on a common site over a range of typical operating conditions including wind speed, tower spacing, wind incidence angle, and the number of cooling towers. This study first investigated the effect of different tower spacings on the cooling performance of multiple short NDDCTs using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) under a no-wind condition. The simulated tower in all multi-tower simulations is identical and is representative of an actual steel-membrane cooling tower in a campus of the University of Queensland. The geometry of the used cooling tower in this study is a cylindrical shape with a horizontally arranged air-cooled heat exchanger and is 20 m high with a diameter of 12.525 m. This study has shown that, at a tower spacing of less than two tower diameters (2D) where D is the diameter of the tower, a reduction in the scavenging area

Mots clés : Natural draft dry cooling tower ; Short ; Multiple ; Computational fluid dynamics ; CFD ; Wind

Présentation

Version intégrale (13 Mb)