Heat rejection enhancement in natural draft cooling tower using radiator-type windbreakers

• Radiator-type windbreakers are more efficient than solid types.
• They can improve cooling efficiency by three times of solid types.
• Radiator-type windbreakers are efficient even at normal condition.

Cooling efficiency of a natural draft dry cooling tower decreases under crosswind condition. Many researchers frequently recommended solid windbreakers to improve the cooling efficiency. The present research work concerns with the cooling performance assessment of the cooling tower under crosswind condition when the windbreakers are fabricated from the same type of cooling tower radiators. Computational fluid dynamics approach based on the finite volume method has been used to assess the cooling performance of the cooling tower. Numerical results show that radiator type windbreakers can substantially more improve the cooling efficiency than the usual solid types do.