EXERGY ANALYSIS OFTHE CROSS CURRENT COOLING TOWER

The cold water needs to be circulated through the steam condenser of a thermal power plant in order to carry out the waste latent heat of condensation from steam. The hot water leaving condenser needs to be cooled in order to re-circulate it through condenser. Hence the hot water is passed through a cooling tower to reject waste heat to the ambient air through convection and mass transfer. The augmented cost of energy and scarceness of water has made researchers to focus on performance investigation of cooling tower as energy conservation opportunity. The thermal efficiency is generally used to measure performance of cooling tower which is evaluated from properties of the fluids. However this method is inefficient to investigate the major causes of irreversibility inside the cooling tower. Therefore, an exergy investigation is initiated to synchronize with the energy investigation of a cooling tower. This research paper includes the investigation of the thermal performance of a cross current cooling tower through energy balance, mass balance and exergy correlations. The variation of fluid properties with flow direction of fluids and exergy loss within the cooling tower are examined and authenticated through test results. The outcomes of study have shown that the analytical exergy loss is lower than the experimental exergy loss and the exergy loss varies with length and height of the cross current cooling tower. Further the influence of variation in size of cooling tower on exergy loss is evaluated analytically and found that the increase in length of cooling tower than the height reduces exergy loss by 8.18% improving thermal efficiency of cooling tower by 3.57%.