DISCUSSION

Cooling tower is a heat rejection device which rejects waste heat to the
atmosphere through the cooling of water stream to a lower temperature. All
cooling towers operate on the principle of removing heat from water by
evaporating small portion of the water that recirculated through the unit. The
heat that is removes is called latent heat of vaporization. This is why the
water is loss in make up tank and the water must be added in several times.

A cooling tower primarily uses latent heat of vaporization (evaporation) to

cool process water. Minor additional cooling is provided by the air because of
its temperature increase. Cooling tower selection and performance is based
on water flow rate, water inlet temperature, water outlet temperature and
ambient wet bulb temperature in which are determined in this experiment.

The measured wet bulb temperature is a function of relative humidity and

ambient air temperature. Wet bulb temperature essentially measures how
much water vapor the atmosphere can hold at current weather conditions. A
lower wet bulb temperature means the air is drier and can hold more water
vapor than it can at a higher wet bulb temperature.

In the experiment one, the manipulated variable is the heater power

(constant flow rate) which causes the changes of the heat load. In the first
try, the heater power was set to 0.5 kW which produce heat load about 0.594
kW. Heat load is the required heat to be removed from the cooling tower. The
result of the wet bulb at this data is about -0.1 C. This step is repeated for
the other heater power value. The graph of heat load vs.wet bulb
temperature is plotted and it can be concluded that the graph is linearly
proportional. This means that as the heat load increase, the rate of
evaporation also increase which makes the humidity of air increase (wet bulb
temperature increase.) This means that higher bulb temperature, the air can
hold less water.

In the second experiment, the manipulated variable is water flow rate

(constant heat power) which causes the changes of the heat load. Also in the
first try, the water flow rate was set to 0.8 LPM. The resulted heat load is
1.061 kW and the wet bulb temperature is 0.4 C. The same step is repeated
for 1.0 kW and 1.2 kW. From the data, the graph of heat load vs.wet bulb
temperature is plotted and it can be see that as the heat load increase, the
wet bulb temperature also increases. Easy to say here is as more water is
charged to the cooling tower, the more heat load which cause higher rate of
evaporation and also increase the wet bulb temperature.

AIMS/OBJECTIVES
1. To determine the correlation of water to air mass flow ratio with increasing
water
flow rate.
2. Determine the cooling load effect, effect of different air flow rates and also
the
effect of different flow rates on the wet bulb approach and pressure drop
through the packing.