About Adiabat
Adiabat (Pty) Ltd is a South African company that makes DraftSolver, an independent model of dry-cooling systems for the engineers who design, buy, test and run them.
The vendor of a cooling system supplies both its guarantee and the model that judges it. DraftSolver is a model of the whole system that is not the vendor's: its validation record is public, and every number it reports carries the equations it came from and their uncertainty.
Adiabat was founded in 2026 to make that model available to the engineers who need it, as a service they can open in a browser, and to keep it validated as plants are measured and published. The company is small by design: its product is the model, and its record is public.
Who makes it
Dr Wian Strydom, founder of Adiabat and the author of DraftSolver.
Strydom is a mechanical engineer whose research is on natural-draft dry cooling: how a direct dry-cooling system performs from a single cell to a full-scale plant, in still air and under wind, and how such a plant starts up as the wind changes, modelled by co-simulation. Both studies are published in Applied Thermal Engineering and are listed below.
DraftSolver is a new and independent implementation of published methods: Kröger's for air-cooled heat exchangers and cooling towers, and the published literature on natural-draft dry cooling, including those two papers, for the towers under wind and through start-up. It covers air-cooled condensers, dry coolers, heat exchanger bays and natural-draft towers from one setup, and every result carries the equations it came from, their uncertainty and what it was compared with.
Published methods, cited
DraftSolver is an independent implementation of published methods: Kröger's one-dimensional methods for air-cooled heat exchangers and cooling towers, and the published literature on natural-draft dry cooling under crosswind and through start-up, including its author's two papers below. Both papers are open access, and each validation case cites its source.
W. Strydom, J. Pretorius and R. Laubscher
Co-simulation of transient start-up performance in natural draft direct dry cooling system under varying wind conditions
Applied Thermal Engineering 300 (2026) 131471. doi:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2026.131471
W. Strydom, J. Pretorius and J. Hoffmann
Natural draft direct dry cooling system performance at various application scales under windless and windy conditions
Applied Thermal Engineering 248 (2024) 123181. doi:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2024.123181