DEVELOPMENT OF A COMPUTATIONAL APPLICATION FOR DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION OF COUNTER FLOW NATURAL DRAFT COOLING TOWER

A Natural Draft Cooling Tower (NDCT) is one of the essential integral parts of many industries where the process heat is to be rejected to the environment. Designing the NDCT is a tedious process as the calculations are iterative and the number of iterations sometimes exceeds a few million. Due to complex heat and mass transfer mechanisms involved inside the cooling tower, optimizing the design of the cooling tower is an arduous task for the cooling tower designer and the optimization will take multiple iterations of trial and error. In this present work, a new in-house application is developed to carry out the design and optimization of the Counter-Flow Cooling Tower using MATLAB. The application is ensured to predict the optimal design parameters for counter-flow cooling towers. The computational script is developed based on NDCT design codes, standards and literature. For the finalisation of cooling tower design parameters, it accounts for all conceivable combinations and multiple iterations. The accuracy and consistency of the developed application are examined by comparing the results of the existing design through case studies