A Study of Methods and Techniques to Reduce Water and Power Consumption in Thermal Power Plants
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Abstract
In this paper we are studying different methods and techniques to reduce water and power consumption in Thermal power plants. , to compare the efficiency of the existing indirect dry cooling tower and for validating the experimental model the scale is reduced. Hence the dry cooling tower of the diesel power plant of 1MW diesel generator is considered for comparison. The heated water from the diesel generator is supplied to the rotating heat exchanger i.e. two radiators mounted radically in the opposite direction for balancing the weight. As the heat exchanger is rotating the heat from the coolant water is liberated to the atmosphere efficiently through forced convection without the usage of fans and less water mass flow. The power required to rotate the fans is reduced and only a part of that power is used for rotating the radiators. In the present research paper, theoretical analysis was carried out in MATLAB coding for different sizes of radiator cores. Design optimization was done in MINITAB using the TAGUCHI method. The parameters that affect the design of different sizes of radiators were varied such as width, height, and number of tubes and fins, water and air mass flow rate, air velocity, and found that the heat transfer rate increases as an increase in the width of the fin, number of tubes, and air velocity. CFD analysis was done using ANSYS Workbench to obtain the heat transfer in tubes for the airflow by varying the pressure drop and mass flow rate of water. By varying the inlet pressure and water mass flow rates, it was proved that as the water mass flow rate and the pressure drop increases, the outlet water temperature creases. The theoretical and CFD results were validated with the experimental results. An experimental investigation was done to compare the water outlet temperature, water consumption, power consumption, and cost of the rotating radiator with the dry cooling tower available commercially in the industries. This paper can be used on a large scale to reduce water and power consumption in thermal power plants wherever dry cooling towers are used.