Mechanical design engineers can protect owners from unnecessary expense, maintenance, and even liability with a carefully written specification. Our experience has shown that including the following items whenever the project or application allows will provide the best…

Servicing and maintaining cooling towers can be dangerous work. Since regular cooling tower maintenance is absolutely necessary for safe and efficient cooling tower operation, engineers have a responsibility to incorporate safety infrastructure into their cooling tower designs.  That means providing…

Bad things happen when sediment collects in the bottom of a cooling tower cold water basin. Really bad. Things like premature equipment failure and downtime, not to mention fairly rapid loss of efficiency. That’s why JMP always recommends including …

Excessive vibration in cooling towers is a problem that must be avoided at all cost. At the very least, vibration can cause excessive…

Every cooling tower design requires a strategy for supplying make-up water to replace water that is lost due to evaporation, drift or blowdown. This is necessary to maintain the condenser water volume and keep dissolved minerals sufficiently diluted.  There are two basic make-up water strategies…

What cooling construction materials are best suited for HVAC applications? It’s a question you will have to address if you are designing a cooling tower system or selecting one for a replacement. The answer will vary of course, depending on the client’s budget, application, location, and access to service. Just remember…

Location, location, location. We know how important it is to real estate investments, but did you know it’s also critical a factor when it comes to selecting the air inlet design for a….

Cooling towers for HVAC systems come in either crossflow or counterflow configurations. This is defined by the way the water meets the heat transfer surface, more commonly known as the “fill” surface. Crossflow cooling towers distribute the hot water…

Every cooling tower has a fan (or fans if it includes multiple cells) and these fans require some sort of mechanism or “driver” to transfer energy from the motor to the actual fan. This transfer can be…

“Would my project be better served by an open loop cooling tower or a closed loop cooling tower?”

It’s a question that anyone in the early stages of designing a hydronic system that requires heat rejection is certain to ask. The answer is partly intuitive but also based o…

When designing a cooling tower, one of the first decisions an owner or engineer must make is whether choose a packaged, factory assembled tower or…

Cooling towers come in many different shapes, sizes and configurations. So, with so many choices, how does one decide which is right for a given application? With this series, “How to Pick a Cooling Tower” we are…