13-05: Air Cooled Steam Condenser Test Laboratory

Power plants that incorporate Air Cooled Steam Condensers (ACC’s) offer significant water savings over power plants using traditional evaporative cooling technologies. State-of-the-art ACC’s feature single-row finned tubes installed in an A-frame steel structure. The steam from the turbine exhaust condenses as it is directly cooled by forced convection of the ambient air. Precise knowledge of the heat transfer and pressure drops both on the steam side and airside, are vital to allow the ACC supplier to properly rate the equipment and guarantee its performance. EVAPCO has designed, built, and commissioned a unique wind tunnel to investigate ACC heat exchangers. To best serve our clients, this one of a kind laboratory installation incorporates a full size (up to 35ft tall) heat exchanger test section, required for many client applications. The process loop produces steam under vacuum in conditions typically utilized in power or other process plant applications. The ability to test the heat exchanger with steam under vacuum rather than hot water makes it unique as well, and allows EVAPCO to optimize the Air Cooled Condenser design with unprecedented precision; giving particular attention to phenomena such as freezing, air leakage, impingement, flow accelerated corrosion (FAC) and limiting the high parasitic power losses associated with Air Cooled Condensers. The EVAPCO Dry Cooling test laboratory can not only test first stage (concurrent flow, K, or condenser cell) or second stage flow (counter-flow, dephlegmator or reflux cell), in a 100% direct cooling configuration, but can be adapted to also test hybrid/parallel condensing systems