A web-based cooling tower application Addressing a common Engineering equipment

This study describes a web-based application to readily compute the "mass-transfer coefficient" in a cooling tower, relating the coefficient to the flows of water and air. The application is freely available to any user just by means of a browser, i.e., installing no software in the user's computer, thus needing no special performance or specific operating system. We address an Engineering problem about the mentioned equipment, and, in our approach, congregate the Web and various computer languages: PHP, Python, Fortran. A restricted objective of the study is, using common theory, to compute that coefficient, taught in Engineering courses and key to the design of a cooling tower, and to attract students to computing. A broader goal is to call the attention both to the use of the Web for scientific computing, and to many students' limitedness. This study is an example of web-based computing, which uses the same executable programs as classic computing, the hard task in Engineering and other areas. A remarkable advantage of this approach, which we think little explored, is the ease of access, thus also facilitating the desirable collaboration between academia and industry in the current context of fluent communication.