HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER IN AN INDIRECT CONTACT COOLING TOWER: CFD SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENT

The present work is focused on the computational analysis of heat and mass transfer in an indirect contact cooling tower. The main objectives of the study are to contribute to the understanding of heat and mass transfer mechanisms involved in the problem and to check the possibility of making use of a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for simulating mass and heat transfer phenomena occurring in indirect cooling towers. The CFD model uses as boundary conditions the temperatures of the tubes obtained by a correlation model developed by Mizushina. The available mass transfer correlations for indirect cooling towers are presented and compared with a correlation obtained from CFD simulations. The assumption of analogy between heat and mass transfer is also discussed.