The Study of Air-Cooled Condenser (ACC) Under Wind Velocity and Environmental Temperature Conditions

Abstract

The use of air-cooled condenser (ACC) has become very popular in erecting thermal powerplants around the world since two or three decades ago. The advantages of forced convection heat cooling system, instead of the classical natural draught convection heat transfer cooling systems, promote the thermal powerplant designers and users to benefit more from such systems in their thermodynamics cycles. However, such forced convection heat transfer mechanisms, can lose their cooling efficiency in off-design ambient conditions, i.e., in high wind velocity and high ambient temperature conditions. There have already been some efforts to analyze the reduction of ACC System performance in some critical ambient conditions. This work presents a detail investigation on the performance of an ACC in real conditions of an existing powerplant. We use the computational fluid dynamics CFD tool and quantify the detail performance of the ACC system in different wind velocities and ambient temperature conditions.