Research on the development and performance evaluation of drift eliminator for seawater cooling tower

摘要

Seawater cooling towers (SCTs) have been used since 1970s in power generation and other industries to reduce the consumption of freshwater. The salts in seawater are known to create several considerable problems, including salt deposition, packing blockage, corrosion, and certain environmental impacts from salt drift and blowdown return. The drift phenomenon is of importance for the performance of SCT. Especially, conventional drift eliminator in large scale mechanical draft SCT usually fails to capture liquid droplets due to high flow velocity. To solve this problem, a novel drift eliminator for SCT has been developed. The drift eliminator is manufactured with a three-dimension trapezoidal wave structure, which is helpful to reduce the drift. An experiment was carried out to research the drifting ratio of the concentrated SCT. The results show that the average drifting ratio of SCT was only 0.000, 533% when the inlet flow rate was 2,822 m(3)/h. It proves that the novel drift eliminator can satisfy the mandatory requirement for SCT. Overall, the novel drift eliminator for SCT has a perfect water drift performance.