Solution of heat and mass transfer in counterflow wet-cooling tower fills

Model of heat and mass transfer in wet cooling tower fills is presented. The model consist of a set of four 1 D ODES describing the mass and energy conservation and kinetics with boundary conditions prescribed on opposite sides of the computational domain. Shooting technique with self adaptive Runge-Kutta step control is applied to solve the resulting model equations. The developed model is designed to be included in a large scale CFD calculations of a natural draft cooling tower where the fill is treated as a porous medium with prescribed distributions of mass and heat sources. Thus, the technique yields the spatial distributions of all flow parameters, specifically the heat and mass sources. Such distributions are not directly available in standard techniques such as Merkel, Poppe and e-NTU models of the fill where the temperature of the water is used as an independent variable. The method is validated against benchmark data available in the literature. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.