Dong et al. 2021
The Gatton tower's steady end-state, from a second campaign
Tier 2: measurement on a controlled rig.
System: Indirect dry cooling, natural draft, horizontal array
- What was compared
- The steady state of the 20 m Gatton natural-draft dry cooling tower with a horizontal array, windless, at a burner input of 845 kW and a water flow of 15 kg/s: the water temperatures, and the heat transfer rate the model gives at the measured water inlet temperature.
- Against
- Measurements on the operating tower by Dong et al. (2021, Section 3.1, Fig. 4 and Table 1), with stated sensor uncertainties (±2.82% on the heat transfer rate). The steady water temperatures are read off a figure and agree with the independent campaign of Li et al. (2017, Table 3) to 0.1 K on the inlet.
- The agreement
- The model over-predicts the heat transfer rate by 25.8% with its default air-side relations and by 12.3% with the paper's own bundle loss coefficient, both far outside the measurement uncertainty.
- What it shows
- The case records the size of the model's error on a small tower whose in-line bundle differs from the staggered bundles every available air-side relation was fitted to; it is refused for model-form uncertainty and validates no relation on this bundle. It also holds the only measured repeatability in the catalogue: two campaigns on the tower differ by 0.1 K on the water inlet temperature and 0.4 K on the outlet.
- 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 test.