A novel natural draft dry cooling system with bilaterally arranged air-cooled heat exchanger

As widely recognized, ambient winds may significantly deteriorate the thermo-flow performances of natural draft dry cooling system in power plants. Therefore, it is of benefit to the design and operation of natural draft dry cooling system to propose measures against the adverse wind impacts. In this work, an innovative configuration of the bilaterally arranged air-cooled heat exchanger system is proposed, and the corresponding computational models combining the natural draft dry cooling system with the condenser are developed and solved. The thermo-flow performances of the proposed natural draft dry cooling system in three wind directions of 0 degrees, 45 degrees and 90 degrees at various wind speeds are investigated, and compared with the conventionally circular configuration. The results show that the thermal-flow performances of the innovative natural draft dry cooling system are superior to the current system with circularly incorporated cooling deltas at various wind speeds, except for the wind speed higher than 14 m/s in the wind direction of 90 degrees. So the natural draft dry cooling system with bilaterally arranged air-cooled heat exchanger can be recommended for its better performance under windy conditions in power plants. (C) 2016 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.