A study of energy effectiveness in a cooling tower

Cooling tower (CTW) is widely used in a variety of engineering application where there is a need to release the heat from a hot water flow into a cooler atmosphere. As a result, operation of any CTW depends not only its own configuration but also on climatic conditions under which it is employed. In this study, a laboratory-scale CTW with a maximum heat capacity of 89,000 kJ/hr was made to study effect of air humidity and temperature, air-to-water flow ratio, specific surface area and packed bed height of the CTW on its energy effectiveness that is characterized by water temperature and water flow rate at the outlet of CTW. Based upon the experimental results, two correlations were developed to estimate these parameters. The calculated results has shown a good agreement with the experimental ones.