Experimental drift study of a dry and adiabatic fluid cooler

Abstract

Water drift emitted from cooling towers is objectionable for several reasons, mainly due to human health reasons. These objections raise walls to the installation of the cooling towers and penalize the COP of the cooling plants they serve.The dry and adiabatic fluid cooler works as a standard fluid dry cooler enhancing the dry cooler´s capacity with adiabatic pre-cooling of the air intake. The objectives of this work were two-fold: the first one was to review the drift test methods usually used on cooling towers, and the second one was to carry out drift measurements on a dry and adiabatic fluid cooler and on a cooling tower of similar capacity working in real facilitis. No drift was registered on the dry and adiabatic fluid cooler by using the sensitive paper drift test method, while a drift of 0.0023% was measured in the cooling tower.