94-15: Testing Procedures for Wet/Dry Plume Abatement Cooling Towers

For several years many cooling towers have been designed with a plume abatement device to reduce or eliminate plume formation under some weather conditions (mainly in winter). The combination wet/dry tower produces the desirable invisible plume of the dry cooling tower while maintaining the high thermal efficiency of the wet cooling tower. This paper describes the testing of wet/dry plume abatement cooling towers to verify performance under the manufacturer's guarantee. The guarantee is expressed as a maximum plume relative humidity as a function of the cooling tower working parameters (flow, range, inlet air temperature and humidity).