Power Plant Air Cooling Water System
Background
In this exercise the customer used PIPENET to model an indirect air cooling tower system in a 330MW unit power plant, located in China. The model featured:
- Carbon-steel pipes
- 168 heat exchangers in the cooling tower (modelled by PIPENET general pressure loss components)
- 2 Cooling water pumps
- A two-chamber, double-journey Condenser with 22 OD x 0.5 mm tubes (modelled by a PIPENET pipe bundle).
- Pressure loss due to the filters before the cooling pumps is 1.259 m of head at 5.08 m3/s.
The purpose of the modelling exercise was firstly to estimate the pressure surge caused by a pump trip, and the likelihood of the pumps being forced into reverse rotation; and secondly to examine strategies to alleviate the problems, such as closing the pump outlet valves or installing an expansion tank.
