Well considered. In Arabia, particularly, the modern power plants incorporate desalination facilities as a matter of course. UK is now having to consider the same. The technology is there: it is simply a case of motivation from whichever direction. ■

Originally Posted by Lyle Brown

Cooling towers are generally dosed with addatives to manage biological growths and or faciltiate managing the cleanliness of the tower in general or tower blow down water for treatment and subsequent reuse as cooling water.

Suspect the dosing agents would require management prior to reuse.

Physically catching the vapour (size and height) and then cooling it would be some other considerations.

Regards,

Lyle

Agreed, but like the clever Arabs the thread was questioning the overall principle of using a bog simple updraft cooling tower in the first place. ■

Interesting.

My understanding is that the white plumes seen exiting the large cooling towers typically at power stations is not steam, but water vapour. The function of the towers is to take ambient air from the surroundings, use it to cool the water from the condenser cooling circuit which is sprayed from the top of the tower and collected from the bottom of the tower. So cool dry air enters the bottom of the cooling tower and warm moist air leaves from the top.

But the practicabilities of separating the water vapour from the air remain. I've no idea how much air flows through a cooling tower but it may be considerable. How to do it without using a lot of power? And would the water be safe to use. ■

Try "mist eliminator" in your search engine. Companies like Amistco and Kimre come up.

Also dry "demister" and/or "demister pad."

Yes, steam is colorless. Steam condensate -water vapor in air, has that white cloud color. The stuff coming out of the teapot that you can see is the condensed water droplets - actual steam is transparent like air. ■

As an alternative to a cooling tower/heat exchanger combination, a Wet Surface Air Cooler is used for fluid cooling or vapor condensing.

The main points of this technology are:

-fluid to be cooled stays in a closed-loop

-large diameter (approx 1-1/4") tubes eliminate the potential for plugging

-can provide lower temperature than alternative cooling tower/heat exchanger or air-cooled systems

In addition to cooling the fluid stream, the treated water can possibly be used as spray system makeup, reducing the system water requirements.

Drift eliminators can be incorporated into the design.

Sizes range from smaller packaged to larger field-erected units, with capacities from 100 to 10,000+ gpm. These are used all over the world for numerous industrial applications. ■