Evaporative towers, also called cooling towers, are very simple machines that offer very high thermal efficiency, aimed to work during the whole year and all day through. They are so able to dissipate large amounts of heat with on the other hand a small energy consumption, limited to the air circulation and the water feeding circuit. Cooling towers are an excellent solution in many industrial applications, whenever processes require cooling water at average temperatures of +30°/35° C. These are thermal levels not at all extreme, which are enough for several production plants such as:
In all of the above, as well as in many other fields, the employ of a chiller is indeed excessive, too much demanding in terms of energy consumption in relation to the fair cooling levels required. Evaporative towers are also the ideal solution in cooling plants, employed to obtain the cold water that is re-circulating in condensers of refrigerating groups. This is what happens typically in huge residential technological plants, commercial centers and hospitals, all involving very huge amounts of heat to be dissipated.
There are different kinds of evaporative towers, but their operations are all based on the same principle: heat subtraction by means of water evaporation. There are several typologies of towers:
The most efficient typology, with both induced or forced draft, is the counter flow one.
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