Experimental study on the thermal performance of a mechanical cooling tower with different drift eliminators

Cooling towers are equipment devices commonly used to dissipate heat from power generation units, water-cooled refrigeration, air conditioning and industrial processes. Water drift emitted from cooling towers is objectionable for several reasons, mainly due to human health hazards. It is common practice to fit drift eliminators to cooling towers in order to minimize water loss from the system. It is foreseeable that the characteristics of the installed drift eliminators, like their pressure drop, affect the thermal performance of the cooling tower. However, no references regarding this fact have been found in the reviewed bibliography. This paper studies the thermal performance of a forced draft counter-flow wet cooling tower fitted with different drift eliminators for a wide range of air and water mass flow rates. The data registered in the experimental set-up were employed to obtain correlations of the tower characteristic, which defines the cooling tower’s thermal performance. The outlet water temperature predicted by these correlations was compared with the experimentally registered values obtaining a maximum difference of ±3%.