A comprehensive synthesis approach of re-circulating cooling water system based on stage-wise structure and Poppe method

Abstract

Most studies in re-circulating cooling water system(RCWS) synthesis principally focused on configurations and economic optimizations but ignored the water and air evaluation in the cooling tower. This study proposes a comprehensive RCWS synthesis method based on stage-wise structure and the Poppe method to optimize the economic cost and determine the cooler configurations while simultaneously evaluating the water and air parameters. The closed-loop issues manipulation and differential evolution algorithm are applied for calculating the iteration process for unsaturated and supersaturated air conditions. The validation and case study are presented to confer the discrepancies between the proposed and previous models. Then different types of matching, comparison of different tower inlet limit temperatures, and makeup temperatures are proposed to explain the discrepancy of tower calculation methods and stage numbers. The validation and discussion show that the TAC calculations for the four cases are reduced by about 4% and the outlet air temperature of the Poppe method is about 2 °C lower than the Merkel method, with a supersaturated state. This study proposes a comprehensive approach for RCWS accurate synthesis problems.

Keywords

• Re-circulating cooling water system
• Stage-wise structure
• Poppe method
• Supersaturated states