Testing the thermal performance of water cooling towers

The essential service water system (ESWS) in nuclear power plants circulates the water that cools fan coolers, cooling water heat exchangers, and condensers and other components before dissipating the heat into the environment. Because this includes cooling the systems that remove decay heat from both the primary system and the spent fuel rod cooling ponds, the ESWS is a safety-critical system. In locations without a large body of water in which to dissipate the heat, water is recirculated via a cooling tower. Cooling towers fall into two main categories: Natural draft and Mechanical draft. Since, the mechanical draft cooling towers are much more widely used; the focus is on them in this work to measure its performance. Therefore; the present work addresses the thermal acceptance test for mechanical draft water cooling tower in order to determine its thermal capability in accordance with the cooling technology institute (CTI) code recommendations. Both the Characteristic Curve and the Performance Curve Methods are used. A detailed description of the test procedure according to the CTI ATC-105 test code is presented, and the test code is applied on the Egypt second research reactor (ETRR-2) cooling tower as a case study. All the instruments used in the reactor plant are calibrated prior the test and the measured data is collected at regular intervals according to the code recommendations. The test result shows a tower capability of about 105 % and so the tower is thermally accepted.