People who own businesses that involve power plants, steel mills, manufacturing, or large commercial buildings like hospitals, schools, hotels, and airports, are probably always looking for ways how they can save money from essential expenses. One of the biggest expenses of businesses like these is water consumption from using cooling devices like air conditioning. But this can be solved with the utilization of cooling towers.
For example, in the United States, there is a growing number of data centers due to the huge amount of digital information stored and streamed. The massive computer power in these data centers generates heat, making efficient cooling an essential building system requirement. With this, cooling towers are an important part of many data center cooling systems.
If you want to learn more about cooling towers and how they can help with your business, you’re in the right place. In this article, we are giving you the different factors on how your business can save money using cooling towers.
What is a Cooling Tower?
A cooling tower is an efficient device used to remove heat. It utilizes water to transfer processed waste heat into the atmosphere. The cooling tower parts operate on the idea of eliminating heat from water by evaporating a small percentage of water that is recirculated through the unit. The mixture of warm water and cool air releases dormant heat of vaporization, causing water to cool. These are the square units that you can usually see on the buildings below when you look down from a high-rise building.
The role of a cooling tower is to cool water. It is a big exchanger, expelling building heat into the atmosphere and returning colder water to the chiller. It receives warm water from a chiller, which is known as condenser water, as it gets heat in the condenser of the chiller. The chiller is usually located at a lower level, like in the basement. The role of the cooling tower is to cool down the water so that it can go back to the chiller to pick up more heat.
How Does a Cooling Tower Work?
Industrial processes and air conditioning equipment, which are usually used by businesses, can produce heat in the form of loads of hot water that should be cooled down. That is where cooling towers enter the picture. Overheated water streams through the cooling tower, where it is recirculated and exposed to cool, dry air. Heat leaves the recirculating cooling tower water via evaporation. The colder water will then enter again in the air conditioning equipment or process to cool the equipment down. This cooling cycle will repeat again and again.
When the warm condenser enters the cooling tower, the water passes through nozzles that spray the water into small droplets across the fill. This increases the surface area of water, allowing better heat loss through greater evaporation. Cooling towers have fans on top to bring in air from the bottom of the tower and move it upwards and out the opposite direction of the warm condenser water at the top of the unit. With this, the air will carry the heat through evaporating water from the cooling tower into the atmosphere.
Why Are Cooling Towers Essential?
A cooling tower is a key component of many refrigeration systems. They can be found in industries like chemical processing, power plants, and manufacturing companies where process cooling is needed. Aside from that, they can also be used to give comfort cooling for large commercial buildings, including hotels, airports, hospitals, schools, and the like.
Cooling towers are bigger than an HVAC system. It is mainly used to remove the heat absorbed in the circulating cooling water systems that are commonly used in food processing plants, power plants, petroleum refineries, and other industrial facilities.
With the increase in the world’s population, there has been a huge rise in the rate of needs by the world for manufactured products. With this, the industrial sector is forced to create more and more products that generate more manufacturing process heat. The heat generated by industries needs to be cooled continuously so that the machines can operate efficiently. To do this, a cooling tower is the most efficient, effective, and least expensive solution.
How Can Cooling Towers Help Businesses Save Money?
Cooling towers are important to a lot of businesses. Therefore, looking for efficiencies in operations and products can impact the bottom line. Water consumption is one of the major operating expenses, and cooling towers can recycle about 98% of the water used in the cooling or air conditioning process. If the unit is made from plastic and uses water instead of air as a cooling method, then as a business owner, you can expect reduced energy costs. In addition to that, there is also little-to-no maintenance needed, and the product can last longer compared to older systems.
Those are highly desirable scenarios for any business to save money. Aside from that, a lot of clients and customers appreciate businesses that are environmentally conscious and always looking for ways how they can work toward sustainable practices. That may not be a money-saving factor, but it can help boost the confidence of consumers, which is good for your business.
If one system can do all the work, from cooling to filtration, there would be more benefits for you on a financial basis. With minimal maintenance needs and cooling tower parts replacement or repair, there would be better savings for your business.
Conclusion
Using cooling towers is indeed essential for businesses, especially those that are in large commercial buildings, manufacturing, and power plants. Not only can they keep your workplace cool they can also help you conserve water, minimize waste, and reduce energy consumption, which is great not just for your business but also for the environment. This is great, especially today, that the abundant supply of fresh water has been taken for granted in many parts of the world. Always remember that water is a valuable resource and commodity that we should also manage efficiently, particularly for power generation. We hope this article helped you learn more about how your business can save money using cooling towers.