94-16: Drift Eliminators and Fan System Performance

Water loss due to evaporation happens in every cooling tower. This is due to the environment. Drift eliminators are used to prevent water droplets from leaving the cooling tower with the exhaust air. They do this by capturing the water droplets and returning them to the water tower. 

 

To achieve peak cooling tower operating efficiency, it is desirable that losses in fan system performance due to the drift eliminators be minimized. Therefore, an experimental program was developed and executed to evaluate the effect of drift eliminator design on cooling tower fan system performance.

 

Flow visualization studies were used to gain insight into the flow patterns within the cooling tower plenum. A fully instrumented fan test was used to investigate the effects upon fan system performance resulting from two different styles of drift eliminators.