POWER March 2017 - 31

WATER & WASTEWATER
4. Sizing Up. Like SPX Cooling Technologies' NC Everest cooling tower, the company's F400 tower also comes largely assembled. However,
because of the tower's larger size more field-assembly is required. Courtesy: SPX Cooling Technologies
makes it easier for an operator to determine
if their tower is starting to drag.
GE also offers regular maintenance and
monitoring of their treatment programs. Using
a water monitoring system called InSight,
GE can track in real time what is happening
inside a customer's cooling tower. The product
allows customers to quickly react to any
problems that may arise. Before such realtime
tracking technology became available,
operators were forced to be reactive instead
of proactive when issues threatened their
tower efficiency. " If you think about it, when
you do it manually, it's always a rearview
mirror look. You get the data, you assess it,
and it's already passed, " Macios said. " The
idea is: Can I pull the data, run the analytic,
and know what's going on in my system
now? "
Saying Goodbye to Inefficiency
While there are many options for upgrading
cooling towers to improve efficiency, at
some point it might be time to trade your
1975 crossflow in for a shiny new counterflow
model. Replacing cooling towers is not
a decision taken lightly of course, but should
March 2017 | POWER
a tower become so degraded or inefficient
that the generator risks being taken offline
or worse, suffering a collapse, the pros may
outweigh the cons.
While cooling tower technology and design
has improved significantly in the last
several years, many generators have opted to
upgrade their older towers instead of starting
from scratch. " There are thousands of cooling
tower cells that were built in the 60s and
70s that were an older style cooling tower,
primarily crossflow cooling tower with
splash fill, " Dwyer said.
Replacing a cooling tower doesn't always
mean replacing the whole thing from the
ground up. It is possible to gut a crossflow
tower and convert it to a counterflow unit.
" That can be a bit of a challenge, because
sometimes it's hard to fit the counterflow
cooling tower into the same footprint, and
you have to do a bunch of piping modifications,
but even if you had an old counterflow
cooling tower, you can replace the fill in it
... with a more modern heat transfer media, "
Dwyer said.
However, if it becomes clear to a generator
that their old, inefficient cooling tower
www.powermag.com
has to go, options for replacement are not as
burdensome as they once were. SPX offers a
line of factory assembled cooling towers that
can be shipped largely complete to a site. The
smaller line, the NC Everest (Figure 3), can
be shipped anywhere in the country in just a
few pieces. Once the tower arrives at the site,
it is bolted together with minimum field assembly
required. " Those six large pieces bolt
together in the field in hours. What we've
basically done is moved the long duration of
field assembly into a factory environment, "
Dwyer explained.
SPX also offers a larger version of their
factory assembled cooling tower, the F400
(Figure 4). Because of the larger size of the
tower, however, shipping of the factory-assembled
pieces becomes expensive quickly.
The decision to upgrade or replace usually
boils down to dollars and cents. " If it costs
$10,000 to fix your car and it's only going
to last two more years, you'll probably just
decide to go ahead and buy a new car for
$15,000, " Dwyer said. The same methodology
can often be used when cooling tower
choices are evaluated. ■
-Abby L. Harvey is a POWER reporter.
31
http://www.powermag.com

POWER March 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER March 2017

Contents
POWER March 2017 - Cover1
POWER March 2017 - Cover2
POWER March 2017 - Contents
POWER March 2017 - 2
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