Evaporative Cooling Applied in Thermal Power Plants: A Review of the State-of-the-Art and Typical Case Studies

A review is conducted about the application of the evaporative cooling technology in thermal power plants. Dif-ferent case studies are considered, namely, evaporative air conditioners, evaporative cooling in direct air-cooled systems, gas turbine inlet cooling, wet cooling towers, and hybrid cooling towers with a crosswind effect. Some effort is provided to describe the advantages related to direct evaporative cooling when it is applied in thermal power plants and illustrate the research gaps, which have not been filled yet. In particular, typical case studies are intentionally used to compare the cooling performances when direct evaporative cooling is implemented in different types of cooling towers, including the natural draft wet cooling tower (NDWCT) and the pre-cooled natural draft dry cooling tower (NDDCT). It is shown that the NDWCT provides the best cooling performance in terms of power station cooling, followed by the pre-cooled NDDCT, and the NDDCT; moreover, the evaporative pre-cooling is able to enhance the cooling performance of NDDCT. Besides, on a yearly basis, better NDDCT cooling performances can be obtained by means of a spray-based pre-cooling approach with respect to wet media pre-cooling. Therefore, the use of nozzle spray is suggested for improvement in the performance of indirect/direct air-cooling systems with controlled water consumption.