What Are Cooling Towers?

Written by News Channel 2 on September 11, 2013. Posted in Closed loop cooling systems, Cooling tower selection, Cooling water tower

Dry cooling tower

People most often associate cooling towers with nuclear power plants, although they are also used to some extent in large chemical plants and other industrial plants. What are cooling towers? Cooling towers are heat removal devices used to transfer process waste heat to the atmosphere. Without cooling towers, people who work in the energy field would be at risk of suffering serious injury from burns.

The first hyperboloid cooling towers were built in the Netherlands in 1918. By the turn of the century 18 years before, there were many evaporative methods of recycling cooled water in use in areas without suitable water supplies. Today, dry cooling towers exist, and they operate by heat transfer through a surface that separates the working fluid from ambient air, such as in a tube to air heat exchanger, which utilizes convective heat transfer.

Cooling towers and Voc removal are crucially important to the sustainability of recycling materials, especially water. VOC removal, which stands for volatile organic compound material, is essential to taking the dangerous chemicals out of water, and is in use by many companies who work in the energy field. Without cooling towers, we would all be in serious trouble and nuclear energy could not exist.

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