Dong et al. 2021
The Gatton tower's start-up from cold
Tier 2: measurement on a controlled rig.
System: Indirect dry cooling, natural draft, horizontal array
- What was compared
- The bundle-average water temperature and the air temperature inside the 20 m natural-draft dry cooling tower at UQ Gatton through a windless start-up from cold, with an 845 kW burner and 15 kg/s of water, computed by the discretised indirect tower with a horizontal array and the plume stage.
- Against
- Measurements on the operating tower (Dong et al., 2021, Section 3.1, Fig. 4 and Table 1), digitised, with stated uncertainties of ±0.5 °C on the water, ±0.2 °C on the air and ±2.82% on the heat rate. The case is Tier 2.
- The agreement
- The water temperature is within 0.2 K of the measurement at 200 s, and the first plume reaches the top of the tower at 225 s against about 280 s measured. Over the start-up the RMS difference is 2.7 K on the water and 4.1 K on the inside air, and the water settles 2.3 K below the measured 307.5 K.
- What it shows
- The agreement supports the discretised indirect tower's plume stage and its early start-up against a measured plant. The draft-dominated stage is not reproduced in time, since the model's draft builds in about 100 s where the measured inside air rises over most of 1000 s, and the end state carries the steady model's excess of 8.5% over the burner's heat on this air-side relation.
- Source
- P. Dong, X. Li, Z. Guan, H. Gurgenci, L. Zhang, J. Feng, 'Starting up a practical natural draft cooling system: Experimental and theoretical study on transients', International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer 126 (2021) 105444Section 3.1, Fig. 4 and Table 1: the windless 15 kg/s start-up at 845 kW.