Cooling towers are widely used in water recycling systems in many industries. In order to achieve energy efficiency as a method to ensure the most efficient recycling water supply system, industrial enterprises are faced with the need to upgrade and optimize cooling tower capacity, selecting the type of cooling tower at the design stage. There are several types of cooling towers: wet, dry and hybrid. Each of these types of cooling towers has its own advantages and disadvantages, thermal characteristics differ from the type of sprinkler. The parameters of operation and the environment also have a significant impact on the efficiency of cooling towers. In the paper, the design of a hybrid cooling tower with a finned radiator is proposed. An approach to optimizing the design of a wet cooling tower is proposed, based on the distribution of water along the partitions (wet zone) and filling the finned tubes with water (dry zone). To evaluate the energy efficiency of the proposed design, the research on the experimental installation was carried out. Thermal output of the hybrid cooling tower and heat and mass transfer efficiency were evaluated according to the proposed dependences. The efficiency of heat and mass transfer processes in the evaporative part of the developed hybrid cooling tower design with transverse finned radiator tubes significantly depends on the mass flow rate of the irrigated liquid and air flow rate. As a result of research, it is proved that the heat and mass transfer efficiency of the evaporator part of the hybrid cooling tower increases significantly when it is switched to the suspended mode. In the moving mode, the heat and mass transfer efficiency, starting from the irrigation density equal to 20.5 m3/(m2-hr), under certain conditions can reach 100%. The conducted experimental studies on estimation of heat output and heat and mass transfer efficiency in a hybrid cooling tower with transverse finned tubes confirm that the heat output indices depend on the hybrid cooling tower operation modes. At the same time, the value of thermal output at cooling of irrigated liquid in the evaporator part of the hybrid cooling tower can reach 1311 W.
Мадышев et al. (Sun,) studied this question.