Library: White Papers

The purpose of this paper is primarily to address the cold weather operation of open-circuit cooling towers associated with water cooled chiller systems, including those with waterside economizers. Closed-circuit cooling towers and evaporative condensers have special requirements that are not covered in this paper.

When placing a cooling tower into long term storage (generally considered one month or longer) there are some basic but critical maintenance steps.

Crossflow and counterflow are two ways to describe how air moving through a cooling tower interacts with the process water being cooled and their fundamental differences.

These storage guidelines are for field-erected cooling towers and other “knockdown” (KD) cooling towers to be stored at the jobsite beyond three weeks before being assembled.

All evaporative cooling products, where air and water come into direct contact, experience some level of drift. Drift is defined as liquid water droplets from the recirculating flow entrained in the discharge air stream.

Water consumed by cooling towers due to evaporation, drift and blowdown can be a concern.