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Cooling Ponds and Cooling Towers

Cooling Ponds and Cooling Towers

The cooling water system is one of the most important system of power plant apd its availability predominantly decides the plant site.

The cooling water requirement in an open system is about 50 times the flow of steam to the condenser. Even with closed cooling system using cooling towers, the requirement for cooling water is also considerably large as 5 to 8 kg/kw-hr. This means a 1000 MW station will require about 100 thousand tons of circulating water per day even with the use of cooling towers. This huge requirement of cooling water is equivalent to a requirement of big city like Bombay.

As the cooling water takes the latent heat of steam in the condenser, the temperature of the water increases.The hot water coming out the condenser cannot be used again in a closed system without pre cooling. This is because, the hot water coming out if used again will not be able to absorb the heat as reaches near to saturation temperature of steam at condenser pressure and the condenser vacuum cannot be maintained. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to pre cool the water coming out of condenser before using again