Hybrid cooling towers
Any combination of Air Cooled Condensers, Cooling Towers, Surface Condensers and Air Cooled Heat Exchangers is commonly termed a “hybrid cooling system.” These hybrid cooling systems are commonly used when water is available but not in the quantities necessary to support a 100% wet cooled system. Tipo Heat Exchangers is widely experienced in the design of such systems and through collaboration with our sister company Tipo Heat Exchangers selected equipment vendors we can provide an optimized turnkey solution for any water restriction and location.
EvapTech’s parent company, Evapco, Inc., always at the forefront of water efficient technologies, introduces a water conserving system for the power generation market…the Air Cooled Condenser. Power plants that incorporate Air Cooled Condensers offer a 95% water savings over traditional evaporatively cooled power plant.
Hybrid cooling tower solves environmental concerns : –
To aid in the higher plume rise, PSI incorporated 4.27 meter-tall fiberglass fan stacks, increasing the discharge height and providing a longer mixing time for the wet and dry combined air stream. To accomplish the required airflow, large diameter (10 m) fans were used. The larger diameter fans with the wide core blade width also helped reduce the overall noise emission from the tower–a permitting requirement for the project.
The circulating cooling water is used to condense the steam for the 30 MW plant. Condensate from the cooling towers can have high levels of H2S, which is very corrosive to most metallurgy. Therefore, 316L stainless steel hardware was used. The fin tube coils use the circulating water, which is partially geothermal condensate, and are constructed of 316L stainless steel.
The efficiency of a fin tube coil is highly dependent on the cleanliness of the inside tube wall and the cooling fins. Therefore, an access walkway around the perimeter of the tower at the coil level has been provided for easy cleaning access.
Special consideration was also given to choosing a suitable fill material in the wet section of the tower. Under normal water quality conditions, cross-corrugated film, fill heat transfer media made from PVC is used. The typical flute opening is 190 mm and consists of several film packs stacked on top of one another. Due to the potential fouling or plugging by the condensate, non-fouling types of fills were used.