10-26: Cooling Tower Basin Leakage Assessment & Mitigation

Cooling Technology in the form of Cooling Towers has been in use for decades and almost from the beginning, the term "make-up water" has been part of the cooling equation. While designers allow for cooling water evaporation into the atmosphere, excessive amounts of cooling water loss requiring "make-up water" has become a larger issue, especially in those semi-arid to arid regions where water conservation is at an absolute premium. Water losses, not associated with process evaporation, usually can be traced to containment losses. These containment losses occur because the retaining vessel materials of construction, most commonly reinforced concrete, is relatively porous, designed with maintenance-prone construction/expansion joints and subject to long-term material shrinkage cracking. As such, techniques have been developed to assess and determine cooling water leakage, joint adequacy, and the presence of subsurface voids. Once assessed, Means & Methods have been developed to repair, stabilize and subseal voids to provide significant water-tightness to existing Cooling Tower Basins, regardless of the technology (i.e., Natural Draft vs. Mechanical Draft.)