Water Savings

Dry fluid coolers use ambient air to reject heat from hot process fluids running through the unit’s closed-circuit coil heat exchanger. Dry coolers have either flat or V-shaped configurations. Hybrid fluid coolers combine closed-loop dry cooling with evaporative cooling for an efficient design that uses less water. Hybrids can be run in dry mode when the temperature set point can be met by dry cooling alone. Adiabatic coolers are a type of dry cooler that use some water to pre-cool the ambient air used to reject heat from the process fluid. 

Water conservation is a high priority in designing and operating water-cooled equipment and plays an important role in USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification and other sustainability programs. LEED assigns credit points to reduce water usage. 

An Illinois food service products manufacturer now saves nearly 60% of their base annual cooling energy costs through improvements made in three phases over several years. The plant, which has a 1200 ton chilled water plant, implemented upgrades including pump and tower fan VFDs and enhanced function controls, free cooling, and chiller compressor drive retrofits. The revisions built through successive phases to capture further benefits from more complete utilization of the preceding steps’ capabilities.

Free cooling can take two different forms: air-side economizers that directly exchange cool outdoor air with the building or water-side economizers that use outdoor air to cool the chilled water used to cool the building. This article focuses on water-side economization in particular using two different methods: stand-alone dry coolers and air-cooled chillers with integrated free cooling coils. 

Chiller & Cooling Best Practices Magazine spoke with Tom Pagliuco, Executive Director Global Energy Engineering at AbbVie, Inc. about best practices for optimizing chilled water systems in today’s pharmaceutical operations. 

For U.S. Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers, Inc. (USFCTG) sustainability is a guiding practice for tobacco production from seed to delivery. So when traditional chemical water treatment had proven problematic in air washers at its plant in Timberlake, North Carolina, the company thought outside the box for solutions to address a variety of issues while also supporting its sustainability goals. 

Do water-cooled chiller plants still deliver lower utility bills? Today, many chiller plant energy analyses carefully account for energy costs, and even energy escalation rates – a factor that projects how fuel costs will increase over time, while ignoring water and wastewater costs associated with cooling towers. While highly effective at transferring heat, cooling towers consume millions of gallons of water each year through the process of evaporation, drift, and blowdown. With the rising cost of water and wastewater, this omission can result in an incomplete picture for the building owner.

Field-erected evaporative “wet” cooling towers, combined with heat exchangers, are an economical and efficient method to dissipate large heat loads at oil and gas refineries and chemical processing plants – as long as they’re free of harmful debris. Yet many cooling towers at these facilities are highly susceptible to poor performance and costly downtime due to problems associated with debris buildup and potential for debris to pass by traditional stationary water screens during the cleaning process, clogging heat exchangers.

Chiller & Cooling Best Practices Magazine interviewed Peter Armbruster (Director of Sales and Marketing) and Bob Smith (Director of Product Management) at Thermal Care to gain insights into best practices used to accurately evaluate and assess a plant’s cooling needs and ultimately provide the solution best matched to the application. 

This article examines challenges with phosphorous-based programs, key factors to controlling cooling water chemistry and the advantages of phosphorous- and zinc-free cooling water treatment technology.