Consideration on the choice of cooling towers for equipment cooling water free-cooling

In many factories, there are machines and equipment generating heat in operation. In order to prevent excessive temperature rise, cooling water needs to be run through the machines. The cooling water is called equipment cooling water and is usually fed using chillers or refrigerators. But, due to they have compressors, the electricity consumption is high. The authors have been proposing “free-cooling system”, which can produce the cooling water using not those machines but cooling towers. In this paper, consideration is restricted to flow rate of cooling tower circulating water and cooling tower capacity in free-cooling. Resulting temperature and other various temperature values are calculated based on the heat balance inside the heat exchanger. It is found that a decrease in the circulating water to a certain extent has little influence on the cooling water temperature. On the contrary, that sometimes makes the temperature even lower in case of using a large capacity cooling tower.