Cooling Tower and Condenser Water Design Part 4: Cooling Tower Air Flow Considerations

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Cooling towers are one of the most effective strategies for reduction of cooling load – at least as long as you don’t invade their personal space. Cooling towers are far more likely to do their thing and do it well when they’ve got some room to breathe, preferably with an unobstructed view. Bad things happen when you crowd a cooling tower with walls or solid enclosures....
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Cooling Tower and Condenser Water Design Part 3: Understanding Tonnage, Range, and Approach

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Last time we talked about the impact that the wet bulb temperature has on cooling tower performance. In summary, it’s harder to evaporate water into air that’s already wet. (I.e. The higher the wet bulb, the harder a cooling tower has to work to evaporate enough water to maintain set points.) In this blog, we’re going to define what those set points are, how cooling towers are rated, and finally how these factors impact the cooling tower size and operation for a given application.
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Cooling Tower and Condenser Water Design Part 2: The Impact of Wet Bulb on Cooling Tower Performance

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How do you evaluate the performance of a cooling tower? What factors impact how effective a cooling tower will be in a given application? To get to the bottom of either of these questions – which are essential questions to ask when sizing a cooling tower – it’s important to understand the impact of the ambient wet bulb temperature on cooling tower performance.
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Cooling Tower and Condenser Water Design Part 1: The Refrigeration Cycle

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Cooling towers are simple mechanisms. Their operation is based on the natural occurrence of evaporative cooling – something most of us have experienced daily since the first time we got wet and felt a chill. But despite their simplicity, cooling towers play a crucial role in operational efficiency of the entire chilled water system. Not only are they the exit point for all those BTUs in a building that the chilled water system is working so hard to absorb and eliminate, their operation has the potential to significantly reduce the amount kWs going to the biggest energy hog in our system—the chiller.
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Thinking Beyond Plate & Frame Heat Exchangers for Waterside Economizing

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By Chad Edmondson

  “What type of heat exchanger is best for my waterside economizer application?”

 It’s a question we get asked a lot.  With the increased requirement for either an air or waterside economizing in ASHRAE 90.1 – 2010, we expect to get asked even more – especially since the DOE expects states to adopt the revised standard into their non-residential building codes by as early as next month.

 U-Factor Versus Real-World-Factor

Conventional engineering logic has always leaned toward plate and frame technology for waterside

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