Economic Analyses of Natural Draft Dry Cooling Towers Pre-cooled Using Wetted Media

Evaporative pre-cooling with wetted-medium can improve heat exchange of natural draft dry cooling towers (NDDCTs) in hot days (usually in summer). However, the media introduce extra pressure drop which reduces the air flow of a NDDCT, and as a result, impairs the tower performance. Scholars studied the effect of evaporative pre-cooling on performance of cooling tower through experiments or simulations by taking into account both the benefit of evaporative pre-cooling and the disadvantage of extra pressure loss. They found that the performance of NDDCTs can be improved by wetted-medium evaporative pre-cooling when the ambient air is hot and dry. Nevertheless, whether the pre-cooling proposal will bring potential increase in the revenue for the owner of the power plants employing NDDCTs requires further study. To this end, the current study investigates the benefit of NDDCT with wetted-medium pre-cooling through calculating the electricity production and water consumption.