Experimental investigation on the performance of wet cooling towers with defects in power plants

Wet cooling towers have been widely employed to remove waste heat from power plants. However, these towers usually operate with defects especially in long-time running power plants. Therefore, the influences of the defects, including the conditions of packing blockage, nozzles blockage and nozzles drop, on cooling tower performance was investigated experimentally in this study. Under nozzles defect conditions, 15% nozzles were dropped or blocked in cooling tower. Under packing defect conditions, the packing blocked area was equal to the decreased drenching area under nozzles defect conditions. The performance of cooling tower under normal condition (without defects) and defect conditions is investigated with different inlet air/water parameters. According to the results, under normal conditions and defect conditions, the efficiency coefficient, η, and tower characteristic, KaV/L, decrease with the increase of water-to-air ratio. Compared with normal conditions, the tower characteristics decrease slightly under nozzles blockage and packing blockage conditions, but decrease more than 60% under nozzles drop conditions.