Cooling Towers

As an integral component of many cooling systems, cool­ing towers are typically used in industrial applications and in large commercial buildings to extract heat from a process or building system through evaporative cooling. Cooling tower systems operate most efficiently when their heat transfer surfaces are clean, but by design, require a large air­water interface to obtain this cooling. The system is therefore subject to four major water treatment concerns: corro­sion, scaling, fouling and microbiolog­ical activity. These waterborne deposits (suspended solids) reduce heat transfer efficiency, which substantially increases the energy cost for operation of chillers. As concerns increase with water usage due to drought and the desire to reduce wastewater dis­charge, many cooling towers are now being operated at higher contaminant concentrations (high cycle) than pre­vious. These higher concentrations of suspended solids created by reduced blowdown, only compound the prob­lems within the system by increasing the deposition rate. However, the suspended solids can be effectively re­moved from cooling water by means of filtration, allowing for the high cycle operation.