Software to design a cooling tower

Abstract

Cooling tower is a unit operation widely used in the chemistry industry. It is used to cool water that has lost its utility as a refrigerant because it has been used in condensers and heat exchangers. After cooling, water can be reused or send back to the environment without thermal damage. Although cooling towers can generate large steam plumes, which causes many people to associate this steam with smoke and pollution, it is a clean operation that takes advantage of the principle of cooling by water evaporation. In this project, a tool is created to facilitate the design for this type of operation. That is why an executable application has been made, using the python programming language. The program calculates the height of a counterflow water cooling tower for a given set of parameters: water and air inlet conditions, water outlet conditions and individual transfer coefficients. The solution is obtained by solving the mass and heat balances and differential transfer equations through the gas and liquid film along the cooling tower. This tool is though for a user that can be specialized or not in cooling towers, in order that the user can get design parameters easily and quickly