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Heat Transfer Engineering

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Modeling of Thermal Performance of a Cooling Tower

Using an Artificial Neural Network
a
Yasar Islamoglu
a
Mechanical Engineering Department, Sakarya University , Adapazari, Turkey
Published online: 17 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Yasar Islamoglu (2005) Modeling of Thermal Performance of a Cooling Tower Using an Artificial Neural
Network, Heat Transfer Engineering, 26:4, 073-076, DOI: 10.1080/01457630590916301

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01457630590916301

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 Heat Transfer Engineering, 26(4):73–76, 2005
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ISSN: 0145-7632 print / 1521-0537 online
DOI: 10.1080/01457630590916301

Modeling of Thermal Performance

of a Cooling Tower Using an Artificial
Neural Network
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 22:47 10 December 2014

YASAR ISLAMOGLU
Mechanical Engineering Department, Sakarya University, Adapazari, Turkey

In the present study, the ability of an artificial neural network model to evaluate the thermal performance of a cooling tower,
which used in the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning industries to reject heat to the atmosphere, is examined. The
network is trained with the following experimental values: the ratio of the water mass flow rate to air mass flow rate, the inlet
water temperature, and the outlet water temperature, and the inlet air wet-bulb temperature are selected as input variables,
while the output is the coefficient of performance. It is concluded that a well-trained neural network provides fast, accurate,
and consistent results, making it an easy-to use tool for preliminary engineering studies.

Cooling towers are widely used in the heating, ventilating,
and air conditioning (HVAC) industries to reject heat into the
atmosphere. Heat rejection is accomplished within the tower
by heat and mass transfer between hot water droplets and am-
bient air. In most cooling towers, packing plays an important
role in increasing the effective contact area between air and
water to promote better heat and mass transfer [1]. When pack-
ing is used, it is almost impossible to predict analytically the
heat rejection performance due to difficulty in evaluating the
contact time and the surface area between the air and the wa-
ter. For this reason, the heat rejection performance of cooling
towers must be determined experimentally [2]. In the present
study, the author is interested in the applicability of an artificial
neural network (ANN) method for the prediction of the cool-
ing tower performance using limited amount of data obtained
experimentally.
ANN is receiving much attention in many engineering appli-
cations: analysis of solar water heaters, heat transfer data anal-
ysis, HVAC computations, and prediction of critical heat flux.
Sreekanth et al. [3] used ANN to evaluate the surface heat trans-
fer coefficient at the liquid–solid interface; Diaz et al. [4], for the
The author acknowledges the assistance of Dr. A. Kurt from Sakarya Uni-
versity with the computer programming, Dr. T. Engin from the University of
Nevada Reno and Professor M. Sen from the University of Notre Dame for pro-
viding research articles for this study.
Address correspondence to Yasar Islamoglu, Mechanical Engineering
Department, Sakarya University, 54187 Esentepe Campus, Adapazari, Turkey.
E-mail: yasari@sakarya.edu.tr
simulation of heat exchanger performance; and Kalogirou [5],
for performance prediction of forced circulation type solar do-
mestic water heating. Farshad et al. [6] used an artificial neural
network algorithm for predicting temperature profiles in produc-
ing oil wells. Recently, Pacheco-Vega et al. [7, 8] modeled the
heat transfer phenomena in heat exchanger systems using neu-
ral networks. Bechtler et al. [9] used ANN to model the steady-
state performance of a vapor-compression liquid heat pump, and
Sablani [10] used ANN for the non-iterative calculation of the
heat transfer coefficient in fluid-particle systems. It should be
clear that ANN methods are useful for thermal analysis in en-
gineering applications. However, the method has not been used
or tested for the analysis of cooling tower performance. This
has motivated the present study for the applicability of ANN
method to predict the performance using the experimental data
of [1, 2].
EXPERIMENTAL DATA
Limited experimental data for a cooling tower, schematically
shown in Figure 1, are tabulated in Table 1. The coefficient of
performance of the tower is KaV/L [2, 11]. The higher the value
of KaV/L, the closer the outlet water temperature will be to the
inlet air wet-bulb temperature. The values of L and G influence
water cooling, and the coefficient of performance has to account
for these effects.

73
 74 Y. ISLAMOGLU

Figure 1 Schematic representation of the cooling tower.

Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 22:47 10 December 2014

BACK PROPAGATION NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH

Among the various kinds of ANN that exist, back propagation

algorithm has become the most popular in engineering applica-
tions [7], and it is the type of network used in this study. A
typical architecture is schematically illustrated in Figure 2. This Figure 2 Configuration of a 4-15-1 neural network for thermal performance
of a cooling tower.
configuration has one input layer, one hidden layer, and one out-

Table 1 Experimental data from the literature

put layer. Each layer employs several neurons, and each neuron
in a layer is connected to all the neurons in the adjacent layer
L/G Tw,i Tw,o WBa,i KaV/L Ref. with different weights. Signals flowing into the input layer pass
0.046 40 28.75 25.20 1.15 [1], from figures
through the hidden layer and arrive at the output layer. With the
0.056 40 28.90 25.20 1.10 [1], from figures exception of the input layer, each neuron receives signals from
0.066 40 29.00 25.20 1.08 [1], from figures the neurons of the previous layer. The incoming signals are mul-
0.076 40 29.20 25.20 1.00 [1], from figures tiplied by weights and summed up with a bias contribution. To
0.086 40 29.34 25.20 0.97 [1], from figures train the neural networks, input data patterns and corresponding
0.046 47 30.83 26 1.18 [1], from figures
0.056 47 30.93 26 1.15 [1], from figures
output targets were required. In developing an ANN model, the
0.066 47 31.14 26 1.10 [1], from figures available data set is divided into two sets, one to be used for
0.076 47 31.33 26 1.05 [1], from figures training of the network (70–80% of the data), and the rest for
0.086 47 31.56 26 1.00 [1], from figures testing the performance [12]. The mathematical background, the
0.046 52 31.90 27.2 1.25 [1], from figures procedures for training, and testing the ANN can be found in the
0.056 52 32.40 27.2 1.20 [1], from figures
0.066 52 32.53 27.2 1.15 [1], from figures
text by Haykin [13], and in [14] for thermal engineering.
0.076 52 32.90 27.2 1.10 [1], from figures The inputs were the ratio of the water mass flow rate to air
0.086 52 33.20 27.2 1.05 [1], from figures mass flow rate (L/G), the inlet water temperature (Tw,i ), the out-
0.30 25.9 20 15 2.50 [2], from figures let water temperature (Tw,o ), and the inlet air wet-bulb tempera-
0.45 25.9 20 15 2.10 [2], from figures ture (WBa,i ), and the output was the coefficient of performance
0.59 25.9 20 15 1.80 [2], from figures
0.67 25.9 20 15 1.71 [2], from figures
(KaV/L). The experimental dataset included 25 conditions, of
1.10 25.9 20 15 1.21 [2], from figures which twenty were used for training the network and five were
0.298 36.7 19.8 25.8 2.337 [2], from tables selected randomly to test the performance of the trained net-
0.599 29.3 20.7 16.0 1.771 [2], from tables work. An evaluation of the ANN capabilities was also made by
1.165 25.9 21.3 16.0 1.288 [2], from tables comparing its predictions with the following correlation given
0.457 32.0 20.4 15.9 2.030 [2], from tables
0.752 27.9 20.8 16.0 1.686 [2], from tables
by Bernier [2]:
Accuracy of the measuring instruments
−0.43
KaV L
= 1.42 (1)
Measurement Accuracy L G
L, range: 0.1 to 0.8 kg/s ±1.5% Input-output pairs of the test dataset are presented to the net-
G, range: 0.3 to 1 kg/s ±2% work, and weights and biases are adjusted to minimize the error
Tw,i -Tw,o ±0.1◦ C
WBa,i ±0.1◦ C
between the network output and the actual value. The first step
in the training algorithm is to assign initial values to weights and
heat transfer engineering vol. 26 no. 4 2005
 Y. ISLAMOGLU
biases in the network based on the chosen ANN configuration.
These values may be either positive or negative and in general
taken to be less than unity in absolute value. The second step is to
initiate the feed forward of information, starting from the input
layer. During the training process, the weights and biases con-
tinuously change as training proceeds. Training of the network
consists of modifying the weights and biases until the output
values differ little from the experimental data that are the targets
[13].
Neural networks perform better if the range of both input
and output values is between 0.1 and 0.9 due to the restriction
of sigmoid function. The experimental data in this study are
normalized in order to have the values in the aforementioned
range. The formula used is the following:
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 22:47 10 December 2014
Actual value − Minimum
× (High − Low) + Low
Maximum − Minimum
where minimum is the minimum data value, maximum is the
maximum data value, high is the maximum normalized data
value = 0.9, and low is the minimum normalized data value =
0.1. In order to decide the structure of the neural network, the
rate of error convergence was checked by changing the number
of neurons in the hidden layer and also by adjusting the learning
rate and momentum rate. Once training is completed, predictions
from a new set of data may be done using the already trained
network. The algorithm is written in the C++ programming
language, and all computations were performed with a personal
computer. The flow chart of back propagation learning algo-
rithm is presented in Figure 3. The mean relative error (MRE)
is calculated according to the following expression:
1 n
100|ai − pi |
MRE =
n i=1 ai
Figure 3 Flowchart of the back propagation learning algorithm.
heat transfer engineering
75
Figure 4 Training error (MRE %) result for configuration 4-15-1 ANN.
where ai is actual value, pi is the predicted (output) value, and
n is the number of data. Moreover, the relative error (RE) can
(2)
be written as
100|ai − pi |
RE = (4)
ai
RESULTS
The purpose of this study is to test the ability of an ANN to
predict the thermal performance of a cooling tower. Network per-
formance was examined for different networks in the 5–20 nodes
in the hidden layer. The error is measured for all of the different
ANN configurations selected for training and testing, includ-
ing the details of both network parameters (hidden layer nodes,
learning and momentum rates). The learning and momentum
rates were both initially set equal to 0.1 and then incremented
to 0.7. The error measure for network performance evaluation
(3) was the mean relative error of all the data points. After 175,000
training cycles a configuration with fifteen nodes in the hidden
layer, a learning rate of 0.3, and a momentum rate of 0.3, was
found to perform best. It is clearly noticed from Figure 4 that
further increase of the training cycles has no considerable effect
on network performance.
The plot in Figure 5 compare the experimental values of the
coefficient of thermal performance of cooling towers with those
predicted using the back propagation neural network model. The
Figure 5 Comparison between the experimental and predicted cooling tower
performance for the best ANN configuration.
vol. 26 no. 4 2005
 76 Y. ISLAMOGLU
Figure 6 Comparison of prediction accuracy of cooling tower performance
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 22:47 10 December 2014
by trained ANN and regression analysis for randomly selected data.
network predicted the performance with less than 0.2% relative
error. In the prediction of cooling tower thermal performance,
the mean errors were found to be 0.78% using ANN and 25%
with regression analysis for the randomly selected five test data
from Table 1, respectively. This is shown in Figure 6. The trained
network predicted the performance with mean relative error of
0.78% and error of up to a maximum of 2.77%. With the empir-
ical equation given earlier, these errors were 25% and 28%, re-
spectively. These results imply that the ability of an ANN model
to evaluate thermal performance of cooling tower is satisfactory.
CONCLUSION
An ANN model was developed for the determination of ther-
mal performance of cooling towers. It was shown that a well-
trained network provides fast and consistent predictions and is
a powerful tool to evaluate the cooling tower performance.
NOMENCLATURE
a area of transfer surface per unit of volume, m2 /m3
G air flow rate, kg/s
K average mass transfer coefficient, kg/s m2
L water flow rate, kg/s
Tw water temperature, ◦ C
WBa air wet-bulb temperature, ◦ C
Subscripts
i inlet
o outlet
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Yasar Islamoglu is currently an Assistant Professor
in the Mechanical Engineering Department, Sakarya
University, Sakarya, Turkey. He received his B.S and
M.S. degrees from Istanbul Technical University,
Turkey, and his Ph.D. from Sakarya University in
the Mechanical Engineering Department in 2002. His
research includes enhanced heat transfer, numerical
and experimental studies in heat transfer, neural net-
work applications and Legionella control in thermal
systems.
vol. 26 no. 4 2005