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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Understanding Primary Secondary Pumping Part 6: 5 Ways to Pump an HVAC System

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By Chris Edmondson

There’s more than one way to pump a chiller or boiler system.  In fact, there are five common approaches, and all but one includes some variation of our topic of late -- primary secondary pumping. 

Variable Primary Pumping

Contemporary systems that do not utilize primary secondary pumping are typically known as variable primary systems.  In this simple design, there is only one set of pumps (chiller or boiler pumps) creating flow for the entire system. 

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