Want to continue learning about engineering with videos like this one? Then visit: courses.savree.com/ Want to teach/instruct with the 3D models shown in this video? Then visit: savree.com/en
I cannot stress enough just how much John's videos have opened up my understanding of engineering principles and processes I once thought I was too... 'Dumb' to understand. His ability to convey how mechanisms work through both 3D animations and calm, un-hurried narration is second to none. Normally I dismiss RUclips creator's suggestions to subscribe to their paid content but, because HIS approach to teaching is so genuine and intuitive I subscribed for three months. Just for purely educational purposes.
@@paullangford8179 that water is not meant to have any contact with the potentially contaminated water of the reactor, It uses heat exchangers so the reactor water and the tower water are not mixing.
@@A.Martin Unless your Britian circa 1950 and just decide to skip the research and build 2 open cycle air cooled reactors where air is just blown through the pile and staight out the chimney!
My master's professor didn't even explain how a cooling tower works inside and expects us to know how to design an HVAC system for a building using both CWS and DX air conditioning. We were all lost! This has been extremely helpful!!! I'm preparing for final exams now and this has brought so much clarity into everything I was trying to memorize, which now I UNDERSTAND. THANK YOU.
A natural draft cooling tower is essentially a huge vertical venturi tube. The added bonus is that as the hot humid air from the tower's base rises to pass thru the tower's constriction (throat), its velocity increases and its pressure drops (Bernoulli). This drop in pressure causes more water to condense out of the air mass (adiabatic cooling), creating a separate stream of hot air. This hot air stream accelerates the rising air mass and keeps it rising even after it clears the throat. Basically, a sort of ground level cumulusnimbus cloud maker. Cool!
I would expect the drift eliminator to be placed in the lowest pressure location in order to maximise the production of adiabatic condensate. But that's not the case in this schematic. Lowest pressure should be just atop of the narrowest section, same as you would have your atomiser in a carburettor. However, here it appears to be below the narrowest section, which is a region of high relative pressure. But then again, maybe there's other things going on or other considerations that aren't obvious to a casual observer like myself.
I'm a fast learner (I bore easily) but I really appreciate you taking the time to carefully explain everything. Most 10 minute RUclips explainer videos skip over important points (often because the creators themselves doesn't understand them) and you end up with more questions than answers.
Bacteria will grow almost anywhere and in the most unlikely places. It was the discovery of bacteria growing in Coke-plant effluent discharge (seriously toxic) that lead to the use of treating toxic industrial waste with bacteria. The result was the ability to treat chemical waste to the point where the discharge was drinkable.
Evaporative cooling is also used in many industrial refrigeration applications. Workers are made aware of the dangers presented by handling this water.
I enjoy learning and your video is very educational. I get a clearer idea of what goes on in these towers now. They are so distinctive and intriguing looking structures, towers, and now I know more about them. So thankyou.
very good video. Id like to point out that the exit for the cooled water is wider and usually has grates to prevent plugging of the water circulation pumps
Good point. We modelled a cooling water system (CWS) inlet with grates for a nuclear power station, and it was indeed much larger. The model did not exist when we made this video otherwise we would have most likely included it.
I remember Kearsley power station near Bolton getting demolished in mid 80s. We used to go down and get thousands of 20mm ceramic spheres and use them in our catapults. The glass industry around Bolton was booming
just a thing; you went into calc III theories and i totally understood what you were saying. mad props; i owe my understanding of the difference of and the relationship between hyperboloids and hyperbolic paraboloids to you and this video. and i thought i was gonna learn about convection... mad thanks and props brother
As a future electrical engineering student I got to tour a nuclear power pant in some time in the late 1980s that was going online. It was a very interesting tour. I did get to see the cooling towers up close.
Thank you for your excellent video. Just a minor correction - the water molecules are not heavier than air, they are lighter. The reason water accumulates on the drift eliminator is that it mostly allows for deposition of already condensed water in the form of aerosol - tiny droplets. These droplets - not the individual molecules - are much heavier than the particles of gas. What happens is similar to sedimentation of a suspension in a centrifuge - in this case sedimentation of an aerosol.
Thanks for informative videos. It is good to have two more points. 1st, re-fill water pipes to replace that evaporated volume. 2nd, how air is passed through as cross flow, cases for low air flow versus high air flow due to windy day and why narrow bell shape body is needed.
Thank you so much for this video! I have just one doubt that doesn't got clear, I didn't understand the reasons of the shape of the tower (larger on top and thinner in the middle). Thank you!
I'm sure they'd mix a small amount of the incoming hot water with the cold water in the basin in winter. This will keep it around 5 degrees Celsius to stop it freezing and will cost them nothing.
The draft has also another component forcing the air up than the heat alone: As the water have evaporated, there is way more water vapor in the "warm" air. And because water vapor is about half density than the air, the more humid air becomes less dense than the dryer air at the bottom. And the "drift eliminator" is not supposed to catch water molecules (these are actually lighter than air when in a vapor form), but to catch water droplets that have not evaporated, so those would present the real water loss.
You deliver excellent content to your audience. It's very interesting material. All of your effort put into creating this video is much appreciated. I'm truly grateful for your help!
For Winterization, why not just divert some of the hot intake water directly to the basin to keep it warm enough? Was kind of expecting that to be shown as the obvious solution...
It's a bit odd because another solution would be to simply install baffles to restrict airflow when freezing is a concern. You can compensate for lower temperature cooling air by reducing flow rate.
The plastic fill is similar to what was used in the cooling towers at Thorpe Marsh near Doncaster. The fill at the cooling Towers at Drakelow power Station was asbestos. I would love to get some technical information on the cooling system that was used at the cooling towers at Willington in Derbyshire. I think it could have been an old Marley Davenport cooling system at Willington given the age of the towers.
I think it should be mentioned that the drift eliminators only return the water in liquid form and not the evaporated gaseous water :) the evaporated water happily passes through as it is actually composed of smaller and lighter molecules than air.
Not quite. The change in direction results in what we call 'impingement'. The pressure at those points is higher and it does cause the water to condense. Not all of it, but certainly a good portion.
@@PhilJonesIII The dynamic pressure change is totally negligible in this case. The water would have to travel at much higher speeds. Drift eliminators are based on the fact that the more dense droplets tend to change their direction less than the steam, thus they gather and coalesce into the surfaces.
Also I want to add that steam does not necessarily condense when you increase the pressure. It can also superheat. This depends on the ratio of steam and liquid water in the container.
Video was very informative,kindly make a video on the following points:- Range, Approach,cycle of concentration, NDCT heat load calculations and chemical dosing for tube scaling and biological fouling.
Excellent video, extremely informative and detailed. Thoroughly enjoyed the video. Just one tidbit bit of information jumped out at me.. "Forced draft cooling towers are rarely, if ever used" They're actually quite popular in the Oil and Gas refinery processing plants ! Albeit they are usually a different design, but they are out there ! :)
12:00 the shape is to replicate venturi tube because the middle has smaller area,, the air will be faster and kinitic pressure will be lower ( kintic pressure from Barnoli equation ot static pressure p=f/a so, kinitic prressre does not depend on area. it is just opposit of velocity) which mean higher evaporation ( water can be boil by reduce the pressure) faster air and more evaporation by reduce pressue ( win win situation ) at top , the area is larger, which means lower speed and higher pressure and that leads to condensation ( water can condense by increase the pressure) the whole point is to cary the water molecules by the air at bottom before the middle and condence it before the going outside the tower they longer the tower, the more exchanging heat to the air without lossing much water
At 14:50 you describe the drift eliminator as if it catches water molecules due to their heavier weight compared to "air molecules". That is not the case. With a molecular mass (M) of 18, a water molecule is lighter than the dominant gases of air like N2 with M=28 and O2 with M=32. The drift eliminator does not catch water molecules in gas form (vapor), only droplets of liquid water. The water that has been evaporated in order to cool the larger portion of the water passes through the drift eliminator together with the air and condenses partially in contact with cooler surrounding air. Without the drift eliminator, there would be a greater loss of water that has not evaporated, a loss that does not contribute to the cooling capacity and is therefore not wanted. The vaporized water has to leave the tower, otherwise it would not work.
Thanks for making the video. Love the content. It is simple in principle but the complexities came towards the end - freezing, bacteria growth, and probably calcification. The pumps, and/or the infusion water of the entire system probably needs to be modulated to regulate the basin water temperature.
This video has very good imaging and the presenter (John) has a good clear speaking voice (if a bit slow), however there are some surprising serious errors in his explanations and a fair bit of sloppy word choice throughout:- 1. At 10:26 he says the air is heated because the heat removed from the water "has to go somewhere" i.e., it seems he thinks that as the water is cooled down by evaporative cooling, that heat has to go somewhere - the air. This is NOT the case and NOT why the air gets heated. If it was, evaporative airconditioning ("swampy" aircon) could not work. In evap aircon, evaporation cools the water AND the air - that's why people use them - the AIR gets cooled. Same with power station cooling towers. The reason why cooling towers heat the air is because the temperature of the incoming water is above the ambient air temperature (typically water inlet 30 C and ambient air 20 C) - this overcomes the cooling effect of the evaporation. Heat energy always flows from a high temperature (the water) to a low temperature (the air) The evaporation cooling increases the cooling effectiveness without slowing down the airflow too much. Where does the heat lost in evaporation go? It is consumed in changing water from liquid to a gas - the "latent heat of evaporation". 2. At 19:12 he says the hyperboloid shape is chosen in part because it accelerates the airflow. This is not so. Any form of constriction in a pipe of tube slows down fluid flow. If you want maximum airflow, choose a cylinder, not a hyperboloid. The reason for the hyperboloid shape is because in a hyperboloid, there is no place or direction where a straight line can be drawn. This means that, unlike a cylinder (or, worse, a rectangle), a hyperboloid cannot easily resonate. Some early cooling towers were cylindrical and collapsed when certain wind speeds occurred caused resonance in the walls. It's no good having a super efficient cooling tower if the thing self destructs. Some people get confused about airflow through constrictions. They think that the constriction causes overall airflow to increase due a principle discovered by Bernoulli. Actually, what Bernoulli said was that a high fluid speed reduces pressure on the side walls. This is how a carburettor works, the low pressure in the venturi, being lower than the air pressure in the float chamber reservoir, draws gasoline out of the float chamber.
I found a mistake in the video. You said water molecular is heavier than air. That is wrong. The reason water drips back down is because the water is in the form of small liquid droplets, not in the gas phase.
Really great explanation.. I am completely new to this and you explained it very well. Often it is super hard to explain something complex in a simple way. Thanks again! Well done! I will be looking for some more details about why the towers have the shape they have. I got from your video that it has to do with improving air circulation..??? But I would to understand better how the shape helps in this. I will try to check out some of your other videos. This was the first of your videos I watched. Again, well done and thanks a lot!!!
I am writing a book on the specific geometric angle of 76.345 degrees. This is the angle of three dimensional Phi scaling. This angle shows up in pyramids, temples, cathedrals, DNA, etc., and per my online protractor app it appears to be the slant angle of the bottom portion of the cooling tower. Is there a way for me to verify the geometry of cooling towers? Is there a patent or blueprint drawings that would corroborate my protractor measurements?
Video ended prematurely. How does that heat exchanger work? Does evaporation play a role? Why is the tower shaped like a Venturi tube? etc etc. Waiting for the sequel to this video.
@15:12 "The reason is, the water molecules are heavier than air." H2O molecule has a mass of 18u. O2 molecule has a mass of 32u. N2 molecule has a mass of 28u. Argon molecule has a mass of 40u. CO2 molecule has a mass of 44u. (u = mass of proton, which is also almost exactly the mass of a neutron.) So actually, the water molecule is lighter than all other common constituents of air. What is the real reason that water has a harder time ascending the u-bend in the drift-eliminator?
My guess is that the drift eliminator provides lots of contact area for the fine water mist to form droplets and for those droplets to agglomerate into bigger droplets. Once the droplets are a certain size, they cannot be carried by the air anymore and drip down. The shape of the drift eliminator is a trade off between offering lots of contact area for droplets to form, but not creating too much drag which will slow down the rising air.
Our lage nuke plants, at my company, us a large gate for the pump suction basin, as opposed to a drain and pipe. That is because the suction demands for the pumps is quite large(~500kgpm). The pipes a several meters in size.
@@savree-3d interesting, it looks really good, on this webpage though I couldn't load the previews of the 3d models. I guess they may require an account, but at least a preview would be interesting to see: savree.com/en/3d-models
Hey thanks; always wondered about these cooling towers and happy to say I learned something new today. I'll have a look at yr linked courses below. Take care :-)
It's interesting to note that the largest nuclear power plant in the US, Palo Verde, which has 3 reactors each with electrical output rated at 1,300 MW, uses three induced draft cooling towers per reactor for a total of nine. Despite the large thermal capacity of this plant they chose not to use natural draft towers because of high ambient summer air temperatures and a limited supply of cooling water in the low desert of Phoenix, Arizona.
They would still use the same amount of water. Older power stations favoured ID towers. The circulating water system (cooling water) still has to remove the same amount of heat from the steam in the condenser, and still has to have some of it evaporated to cool the rest. The higher the ambient temperature, or the higher the humidity, the more CW has to be evaporated to maintain a suitable return water temperature.Tower capacity is designed for local conditions
Want to continue learning about engineering with videos like this one? Then visit:
courses.savree.com/
Want to teach/instruct with the 3D models shown in this video? Then visit:
savree.com/en
can we say that natural draft= vacuum???
Best explanation, love this channel
I am going to have one of these build behind my house to cool my pc
😂i also want
INVEST INVEST INVEST
You killed me
"Intel inside" huh?
PC... powder by nuclear energy...🤣🤣🤣
For 50 years I have wondered how these work - now I know - fascinating and informative video - thank you
Same here
50 years 😮😮
Roshan NAIK
Information was hard to come by
People nowadays tend to neglect this fact.
Im 44 yrs old... And have litterally spent 30 yrs wondering about this. Thank you for scratching a 30 yr old itch!
I cannot stress enough just how much John's videos have opened up my understanding of engineering principles and processes I once thought I was too... 'Dumb' to understand. His ability to convey how mechanisms work through both 3D animations and calm, un-hurried narration is second to none. Normally I dismiss RUclips creator's suggestions to subscribe to their paid content but, because HIS approach to teaching is so genuine and intuitive I subscribed for three months. Just for purely educational purposes.
Sorry.... JON not John
My friend’s young daughter thought those power plants were cloud factories and the finished product came out those towers.
well technically she's not completely wrong
@@MrChoklad She really is not wrong. Clouds are water condensation, exactly what comes out of those cooling towers.
3-year-old child: look! Cloud making machines.
QAnon adults: Look! Proof of deep state manufacturing fake climate change to curb our freedom.
@@maestrovso perfectly logical
Just like what 6yo me think
When I was a kid I thought radioactive smoke comes out of those cooling towers lol
Some adults still think that=P
Some places it does!
@@paullangford8179 that water is not meant to have any contact with the potentially contaminated water of the reactor, It uses heat exchangers so the reactor water and the tower water are not mixing.
@@A.Martin Unless your Britian circa 1950 and just decide to skip the research and build 2 open cycle air cooled reactors where air is just blown through the pile and staight out the chimney!
Simpsons?
My master's professor didn't even explain how a cooling tower works inside and expects us to know how to design an HVAC system for a building using both CWS and DX air conditioning. We were all lost! This has been extremely helpful!!! I'm preparing for final exams now and this has brought so much clarity into everything I was trying to memorize, which now I UNDERSTAND. THANK YOU.
A natural draft cooling tower is essentially a huge vertical venturi tube. The added bonus is that as the hot humid air from the tower's base rises to pass thru the tower's constriction (throat), its velocity increases and its pressure drops (Bernoulli). This drop in pressure causes more water to condense out of the air mass (adiabatic cooling), creating a separate stream of hot air. This hot air stream accelerates the rising air mass and keeps it rising even after it clears the throat.
Basically, a sort of ground level cumulusnimbus cloud maker.
Cool!
I would expect the drift eliminator to be placed in the lowest pressure location in order to maximise the production of adiabatic condensate. But that's not the case in this schematic. Lowest pressure should be just atop of the narrowest section, same as you would have your atomiser in a carburettor. However, here it appears to be below the narrowest section, which is a region of high relative pressure. But then again, maybe there's other things going on or other considerations that aren't obvious to a casual observer like myself.
The most explanatory video I've ever seen.
I'm a fast learner (I bore easily) but I really appreciate you taking the time to carefully explain everything. Most 10 minute RUclips explainer videos skip over important points (often because the creators themselves doesn't understand them) and you end up with more questions than answers.
Good observation. Share your opinion concerning quick and easy videos that don't make much sense if you watch them a few times.
this is cool, you basically learn all those basic in high school, but the way they are used here in this big scale, its just amazing!
Thank you very much sir, now i clearly understood. I was amazed after hearing bacterial growth in cooling tower, thanks for the information.
Bacteria will grow almost anywhere and in the most unlikely places. It was the discovery of bacteria growing in Coke-plant effluent discharge (seriously toxic) that lead to the use of treating toxic industrial waste with bacteria. The result was the ability to treat chemical waste to the point where the discharge was drinkable.
@@PhilJonesIII Right! They also use bacteria to treat arsenic loaded rain water coming from old mine tailings.
Evaporative cooling is also used in many industrial refrigeration applications. Workers are made aware of the dangers presented by handling this water.
This video is super helpful, I have no need to know this but it's really interesting
Great video! Will help for my 4th class power engineering exam :)
Best of luck!
I enjoy learning and your video is very educational. I get a clearer idea of what goes on in these towers now. They are so distinctive and intriguing looking structures, towers, and now I know more about them. So thankyou.
Cooling towers fascinate me as a kid because of how oddly shaped they are. Now I finally understood how it works.
The best video that I've ever seen in my life.. Thank you so much..
very good video. Id like to point out that the exit for the cooled water is wider and usually has grates to prevent plugging of the water circulation pumps
Good point. We modelled a cooling water system (CWS) inlet with grates for a nuclear power station, and it was indeed much larger. The model did not exist when we made this video otherwise we would have most likely included it.
Absolutely saved me when writing a lab report
Wow, that's an excellent, thorough and understandable explanation. THANK YOU!
Cooling Towers are one of the most surreal designs
I remember Kearsley power station near Bolton getting demolished in mid 80s. We used to go down and get thousands of 20mm ceramic spheres and use them in our catapults. The glass industry around Bolton was booming
What's the temperature of hot water and cold water that this tower takes in and gives out?
Why didn't I find you earlier. Just brilliant. The best explanation of cooling towers so far
You're a very competent teacher. Thank you for the video!
just a thing; you went into calc III theories and i totally understood what you were saying. mad props; i owe my understanding of the difference of and the relationship between hyperboloids and hyperbolic paraboloids to you and this video. and i thought i was gonna learn about convection... mad thanks and props brother
@@savree-3d gotchu
As a future electrical engineering student I got to tour a nuclear power pant in some time in the late 1980s that was going online. It was a very interesting tour. I did get to see the cooling towers up close.
Great informative content and explained in great detail, I searched for so long, couldn't find anywhere.Thanks a lot.
excellent ....love from INDIA🥰
Wow! So beautifully explained. Thank you so much.
Thank you for your excellent video.
Just a minor correction - the water molecules are not heavier than air, they are lighter. The reason water accumulates on the drift eliminator is that it mostly allows for deposition of already condensed water in the form of aerosol - tiny droplets. These droplets - not the individual molecules - are much heavier than the particles of gas. What happens is similar to sedimentation of a suspension in a centrifuge - in this case sedimentation of an aerosol.
Thanks for informative videos. It is good to have two more points. 1st, re-fill water pipes to replace that evaporated volume. 2nd, how air is passed through as cross flow, cases for low air flow versus high air flow due to windy day and why narrow bell shape body is needed.
Thank you so much for this video! I have just one doubt that doesn't got clear, I didn't understand the reasons of the shape of the tower (larger on top and thinner in the middle). Thank you!
thank you very very much. your videos are brilliant. please create more free videos for your youtube students.😊🌾
I'm sure they'd mix a small amount of the incoming hot water with the cold water in the basin in winter. This will keep it around 5 degrees Celsius to stop it freezing and will cost them nothing.
Thats what I figure would happen too.
The cooling water never gets cold enough to freeze as long as the plant is running... The hotter water is continuously sent to the cooling tower.
The draft has also another component forcing the air up than the heat alone: As the water have evaporated, there is way more water vapor in the "warm" air. And because water vapor is about half density than the air, the more humid air becomes less dense than the dryer air at the bottom.
And the "drift eliminator" is not supposed to catch water molecules (these are actually lighter than air when in a vapor form), but to catch water droplets that have not evaporated, so those would present the real water loss.
Technical know-how including Health and Safety knowledge! Thanks a lot.....
Very nice explanation. Thanks a lot!
You're welcome
Why do they not have something like a turbo style generator to utilize the exhaust draft?
You deliver excellent content to your audience. It's very interesting material. All of your effort put into creating this video is much appreciated. I'm truly grateful for your help!
You are most welcome!
thank you for the free education...👍🏻
Outstanding presentation ! Thank you !
Thank you for bringing so much rain
Great stuff, thank you🙂...
It's an interesting topic, but the same information could've easily been covered in half the time.
Good grief, no kidding!!!!!
This video is part of a courses, that's why he's doing 7 minutes recap after 12:00
@@akhirulfajar The information density is low from the start.
For Winterization, why not just divert some of the hot intake water directly to the basin to keep it warm enough?
Was kind of expecting that to be shown as the obvious solution...
It's a bit odd because another solution would be to simply install baffles to restrict airflow when freezing is a concern. You can compensate for lower temperature cooling air by reducing flow rate.
Thank you so much, now i clearly understood.
Fantastic video, congratulations!
Thanks for your sharing
The plastic fill is similar to what was used in the cooling towers at Thorpe Marsh near Doncaster. The fill at the cooling Towers at Drakelow power Station was asbestos.
I would love to get some technical information on the cooling system that was used at the cooling towers at Willington in Derbyshire. I think it could have been an old Marley Davenport cooling system at Willington given the age of the towers.
Excellent video! Thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
This is awesome, thank you!
Very informative video
I think it should be mentioned that the drift eliminators only return the water in liquid form and not the evaporated gaseous water :) the evaporated water happily passes through as it is actually composed of smaller and lighter molecules than air.
Not quite. The change in direction results in what we call 'impingement'. The pressure at those points is higher and it does cause the water to condense. Not all of it, but certainly a good portion.
@@PhilJonesIII The dynamic pressure change is totally negligible in this case. The water would have to travel at much higher speeds. Drift eliminators are based on the fact that the more dense droplets tend to change their direction less than the steam, thus they gather and coalesce into the surfaces.
Also I want to add that steam does not necessarily condense when you increase the pressure. It can also superheat. This depends on the ratio of steam and liquid water in the container.
Excellent !
Awesome vedio.... It clears my many concepts... Please keep on adding such 3D type vedioes... I am gonna to watch all 😍😍
@@savree-3d already done
Really helpful!!
I'm so glad!
7:09 Did anyone else instantly do this after he said it and got chills down their spine as it actually worked?
The first opening should be: The design is very human... to be catchy nowadays, haha. But thanks for the video
very informative
Please apload video on steam boiler like Cochran, locomotive, webcock and Wilcox boiler.
Video was very informative,kindly make a video on the following points:- Range, Approach,cycle of concentration, NDCT heat load calculations and chemical dosing for tube scaling and biological fouling.
Excellent video! Very easy to understand.
So It's a giant swamp cooler, like the one on my trailer.
Go figure, LOL
That's exactly what I thought swamp cooler
loved the explanation thank you
Excellent video, extremely informative and detailed. Thoroughly enjoyed the video. Just one tidbit bit of information jumped out at me.. "Forced draft cooling towers are rarely, if ever used" They're actually quite popular in the Oil and Gas refinery processing plants ! Albeit they are usually a different design, but they are out there ! :)
Thanks
Thank you for easy and precise information!
You are welcome!
Excellent video.
12:00
the shape is to replicate venturi tube
because the middle has smaller area,, the air will be faster and kinitic pressure will be lower ( kintic pressure from Barnoli equation ot static pressure p=f/a so, kinitic prressre does not depend on area. it is just opposit of velocity)
which mean higher evaporation ( water can be boil by reduce the pressure)
faster air and more evaporation by reduce pressue ( win win situation )
at top , the area is larger, which means lower speed and higher pressure and that leads to condensation ( water can condense by increase the pressure)
the whole point is to cary the water molecules by the air at bottom before the middle and condence it before the going outside the tower
they longer the tower, the more exchanging heat to the air without lossing much water
Excellent explanation, thank you
At 14:50 you describe the drift eliminator as if it catches water molecules due to their heavier weight compared to "air molecules". That is not the case. With a molecular mass (M) of 18, a water molecule is lighter than the dominant gases of air like N2 with M=28 and O2 with M=32. The drift eliminator does not catch water molecules in gas form (vapor), only droplets of liquid water. The water that has been evaporated in order to cool the larger portion of the water passes through the drift eliminator together with the air and condenses partially in contact with cooler surrounding air. Without the drift eliminator, there would be a greater loss of water that has not evaporated, a loss that does not contribute to the cooling capacity and is therefore not wanted. The vaporized water has to leave the tower, otherwise it would not work.
Please upload "Air conditioning System" .... your explanation is great 👍 ....new subscriber 😋
Thank you for the video
Excellent video. Please make more
Thanks for making the video. Love the content. It is simple in principle but the complexities came towards the end - freezing, bacteria growth, and probably calcification. The pumps, and/or the infusion water of the entire system probably needs to be modulated to regulate the basin water temperature.
Nice
Thanks
We walked day and night by the big cooling tower, they have the plant but we have the power.
Extremely helpful 👍
Which designing software are you using
Beautiful explanation!
This video has very good imaging and the presenter (John) has a good clear speaking voice (if a bit slow), however there are some surprising serious errors in his explanations and a fair bit of sloppy word choice throughout:-
1. At 10:26 he says the air is heated because the heat removed from the water "has to go somewhere" i.e., it seems he thinks that as the water is cooled down by evaporative cooling, that heat has to go somewhere - the air. This is NOT the case and NOT why the air gets heated. If it was, evaporative airconditioning ("swampy" aircon) could not work. In evap aircon, evaporation cools the water AND the air - that's why people use them - the AIR gets cooled. Same with power station cooling towers.
The reason why cooling towers heat the air is because the temperature of the incoming water is above the ambient air temperature (typically water inlet 30 C and ambient air 20 C) - this overcomes the cooling effect of the evaporation. Heat energy always flows from a high temperature (the water) to a low temperature (the air) The evaporation cooling increases the cooling effectiveness without slowing down the airflow too much.
Where does the heat lost in evaporation go? It is consumed in changing water from liquid to a gas - the "latent heat of evaporation".
2. At 19:12 he says the hyperboloid shape is chosen in part because it accelerates the airflow. This is not so. Any form of constriction in a pipe of tube slows down fluid flow. If you want maximum airflow, choose a cylinder, not a hyperboloid. The reason for the hyperboloid shape is because in a hyperboloid, there is no place or direction where a straight line can be drawn. This means that, unlike a cylinder (or, worse, a rectangle), a hyperboloid cannot easily resonate. Some early cooling towers were cylindrical and collapsed when certain wind speeds occurred caused resonance in the walls. It's no good having a super efficient cooling tower if the thing self destructs.
Some people get confused about airflow through constrictions. They think that the constriction causes overall airflow to increase due a principle discovered by Bernoulli. Actually, what Bernoulli said was that a high fluid speed reduces pressure on the side walls. This is how a carburettor works, the low pressure in the venturi, being lower than the air pressure in the float chamber reservoir, draws gasoline out of the float chamber.
Boom, the best one
had to come back and watch this because i forgot everything i learnt in on chem eng smh
Great !
I found a mistake in the video. You said water molecular is heavier than air. That is wrong. The reason water drips back down is because the water is in the form of small liquid droplets, not in the gas phase.
Thank you very much
Really great explanation.. I am completely new to this and you explained it very well. Often it is super hard to explain something complex in a simple way. Thanks again! Well done! I will be looking for some more details about why the towers have the shape they have. I got from your video that it has to do with improving air circulation..??? But I would to understand better how the shape helps in this. I will try to check out some of your other videos. This was the first of your videos I watched. Again, well done and thanks a lot!!!
Interesting
Here in Canada, we build our power stations beside sources of fresh water.
I am writing a book on the specific geometric angle of 76.345 degrees. This is the angle of three dimensional Phi scaling. This angle shows up in pyramids, temples, cathedrals, DNA, etc., and per my online protractor app it appears to be the slant angle of the bottom portion of the cooling tower. Is there a way for me to verify the geometry of cooling towers? Is there a patent or blueprint drawings that would corroborate my protractor measurements?
Video ended prematurely. How does that heat exchanger work? Does evaporation play a role? Why is the tower shaped like a Venturi tube? etc etc. Waiting for the sequel to this video.
@15:12 "The reason is, the water molecules are heavier than air."
H2O molecule has a mass of 18u. O2 molecule has a mass of 32u. N2 molecule has a mass of 28u. Argon molecule has a mass of 40u. CO2 molecule has a mass of 44u. (u = mass of proton, which is also almost exactly the mass of a neutron.)
So actually, the water molecule is lighter than all other common constituents of air. What is the real reason that water has a harder time ascending the u-bend in the drift-eliminator?
My guess is that the drift eliminator provides lots of contact area for the fine water mist to form droplets and for those droplets to agglomerate into bigger droplets. Once the droplets are a certain size, they cannot be carried by the air anymore and drip down. The shape of the drift eliminator is a trade off between offering lots of contact area for droplets to form, but not creating too much drag which will slow down the rising air.
Our lage nuke plants, at my company, us a large gate for the pump suction basin, as opposed to a drain and pipe. That is because the suction demands for the pumps is quite large(~500kgpm). The pipes a several meters in size.
is this visualized in Enscape? looks good
Just a screen recording through saVRee.com. Works all through a browser.
@@savree-3d interesting, it looks really good, on this webpage though I couldn't load the previews of the 3d models. I guess they may require an account, but at least a preview would be interesting to see:
savree.com/en/3d-models
Good man
Hey thanks; always wondered about these cooling towers and happy to say I learned something new today. I'll have a look at yr linked courses below. Take care :-)
Great, thank you very much!
It's interesting to note that the largest nuclear power plant in the US, Palo Verde, which has 3 reactors each with electrical output rated at 1,300 MW, uses three induced draft cooling towers per reactor for a total of nine. Despite the large thermal capacity of this plant they chose not to use natural draft towers because of high ambient summer air temperatures and a limited supply of cooling water in the low desert of Phoenix, Arizona.
They would still use the same amount of water. Older power stations favoured ID towers. The circulating water system (cooling water) still has to remove the same amount of heat from the steam in the condenser, and still has to have some of it evaporated to cool the rest. The higher the ambient temperature, or the higher the humidity, the more CW has to be evaporated to maintain a suitable return water temperature.Tower capacity is designed for local conditions
I’m amazed how the are built especially when you think when the first were built