| Title | New Design Concepts for Natural Draft Dry Cooling Towers |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hal Gurgenci and Zhiqiang Guan |
| Year | 2010 |
| Conference | Australian Geothermal Energy Conference |
| Keywords | Geothermal energy, Cooling tower and heat exchanger, natural draft cooling technologies |
| Abstract | Design of efficient natural draft dry cooling system is essential for Australian geothermal power plant applications. In fact, dry cooling may be the only option for most geothermal power plants planned to be established in Australia since these areas have limited access to water resource. Natural draft cooling towers in coal-fired and nuclear power plants have been mainly of concrete construction. It has been reported that the highest concrete cooling tower in the world of 200 meters high has been built at the RWE power station at Niederaussem (Busch et al, 2002). Due to the lower thermal efficiencies of geothermal power plants, the heat rejection per kWh(e) of net generation from these plants will be four or more times as great as from fossil fuelled plants (Kr |