Effect of wind speed on performance of an air-cooled steam condenser

A numerical model for a 2×600 MW air-cooled power plant was established and the commercial code, FLUENT, was applied to obtain the operation patterns of the air-cooled fans at different wind speeds. The influence of the wind speed on the heat transfer rate was also analyzed using the program for condensation of the exhaust steam in the finned tube exchangers. The result shows that the total volume effectiveness of the air-cooled condenser decreases by 15.9% due to the difference of the flow field around the condenser and the volume effectiveness of the windward fans decreases by up to 43.6% when the wind speed increases from 0 m/s to 12 m/s, leading to the decrease in the heat transfer rate of the heat exchangers from 1695 MW to 1418.6 MW.