Due to the impact of weather conditions on the majority of renewable energy sources, many steam power plants have to be operated now and in future under completely different load conditions than initially designed for. Flexible plant operation and rapid load changes become major issues for thermal power plant operation. In order to optimize power plant fleet management and grid stability, accurate simulation tools for predicting steam power plant performance including cooling towers are essential.

In this contribution, a simple one-dimensional model for simulating the performance of large natural draft wet cooling towers is presented. The evaporation zone model rested on the well-known evaporative cooling theory developed by Merkel and Poppe. The off-design behavior of the cooling tower, that is relevant to the part load performance of the entire power plant, was modeled by an empirical power-law approach. A user-friendly method was developed in order to identify the required off-design model parameters by means of always available steam power plant data. This procedure made it possible to employ the simulation tool also for already existing or old power plants for which the original design and construction data lost their validity due to several modifications. The cooling tower model was successfully compared with field data from representative cooling towers at Middle-European steam power plant sites. It is found that the deviations between predicted and measured cold water temperatures remained within the experiemental uncertainty level. With these cooling tower performance data, condenser conditions and hence steam turbine performance might be forecasted rather efficiently.


A Simplified Model for Predicting Natural Draft Wet Cooling Tower Performance of Large Steam Power Plants

Division / Sponsor:
International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/GT/GT2020/volume/84058

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