Experimental study on the performance of a vertical plate packing cooling tower at various air flow rates

Significant research efforts and resources are being put in improving the performance and efficiency of a vertical plate packing cooling tower during their industrial application. Limited success has been achieved as more research effort is still geared towards designing a vertical plate packing cooling tower with more acceptable operating efficiency during usage. This study focused on experimental investigation of cooling tower performance of a vertical plate packing cooling tower. The tower is filled with a packed column of 150mm x 150mm x600mm high in transparent acrylic with 100m²/m³ plate packing. The experiment was performed with three different airflow velocities, 2.74m³/s, 1.95m³/s and 0.6m³/s to test the system performance and efficiency during application. It was also revealed that the cooling tower efficiency is higher at the high airflow velocity, which is 30.5% and lower at a low airflow velocity, which was 12.4%. It can be concluded that the investigated design of the cooling tower is not performing well as the efficiency is lower than 50%.