People most often associate cooling towers with nuclear power plants, although they are also used to some extent in large chemical plants and other industrial plants. What are cooling towers? Cooling towers are heat removal devices used to transfer process waste heat to the atmosphere. Without cooling towers, people who work in the energy field would be at risk of suffering serious injury from burns.

The first hyperboloid cooling towers were built in the Netherlands in 1918. By the turn of the century 18 years before, there were many evaporative methods of recycling cooled water in use in areas without suitable water supplies. Today, dry cooling towers exist, and they operate by heat transfer through a surface that separates the wo Continue reading →