03-07: Crossflow to Counterflow Natural Draft Tower Conversion

This paper describes the turnkey conversion of an existing Marley Class 700 natural draft cooling tower at Mirant Mid-Atlantic LLC's Chalk Point Generating Station in Southern Maryland, USA from a crossflow configuration to a counterflow configuration. The work involved demolition of the severely degraded crossflow cooling heat exchange system and installing an all new composite fiberglass support structure, low-fouling PVC film fill, high efficient PVC drift eliminators and optimized distribution system, within an 11 week planned outage during the Winter of 2002.