Numerical Simulation of Airflow Around Cooling Towers in Semi-closed Space

Abstract

As an important part of the air conditioning system, the operating performance of the cooling tower has a direct impact on heating and refrigeration of the air conditioning system. Now the cooling towers are placed in the room in many high-end buildings, which results in poor ventilation of the cooling towers. In order to improve the efficiency of the cooling towers, the organized air exhaust scheme of cooling towers should be adopted to reduce or prevent the back-mixing of humid air around the cooling towers. A design method of tower group operation performance in semi-closed space was proposed and the air distribution around the cooling towers in semi-closed space under the organized air exhaust scheme was simulated numerically in this paper. The object of this study is a super high-rise building with 10 layers podium and 164 layers main building. The cooling tower room is 67.3m long, 65m wide and 21.6m high, 13 sets of cooling towers are installed in the cooling tower room. The complicated actually physical structure is simplified and the areas of inlet and outlet are established according to the actual area of 50% in the process of numerical simulation. The airflow distribution and flow resistance characteristics around the cooling towers were obtained through the numerical simulation of air-flow organization around cooling towers. The numerical results show that the exhaust air of cooling towers can be expelled from the semi-closed space smoothly with the organization of air exhaust and the airflow in cooling tower machine room is relatively stable, the inlet air volume of cooling towers can reach rated air flow rate and the cooling towers can run efficiently under the rated condition.