Simulation of a Wet Cooling Tower with a Forced Air Draft
Wet cooling towers are used to cool water heated during industrial or power generation processes. This CONVERGE simulation of a wet cooling tower with a forced air draft shows the heat and mass transfer in the domain. A warm water stream is sprayed into the air stream via 12 injectors. In the first view, the contour colors on the parcels show the temperature of the water droplets (blue represents a low value; red represents a high value). The temperature of the water decreases as it falls after coming into contact with the cold air forced into the tower. The volume contours show the water vapor mass fraction (greater than 1.5%) in the domain (blue contours represent a low value of vapor mass fraction; white contours represent a high value). In the second view, you can see the velocity magnitude of the fluid (blue regions represent low velocity; red regions represent high velocity). The third view shows the streamlines, which visualize the air flow and recirculation zones inside the domain. In this view you can also see the “fill”, shown in red. A fill consists of layers of bars or slats (splash fill), or layers of sheets in a corrugated pattern (film fill). They are used in wet cooling towers to increase the interaction time and area of contact between the water and the air. Simulating the flow field between the fine-scale geometrical structures in the fill is computationally expensive. To save time, CONVERGE offers a porous media source model that simulates the flow in the fill without the need to include the actual fill geometry. The model captures the flow effects by converting the defined fill region to distributed momentum resistances.
Convergent Science's CONVERGE is an innovative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that eliminates the grid generation bottleneck from the simulation process through autonomous meshing.