Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulation of flow in cooling tower

Abstract

This study was designed to focus on Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) Simulation of flow in cooling tower. The use of computational fluid dynamics to predict internal and external flow has risen dramatically in the past decade. The objectives of this study were to construct the grid model of cooling tower, to verify the simulation grid dependency and validate the CFD modelling based on experimental results. The laboratory cooling tower is a cooling tower unit from commercial air conditioning system used to study the principles of cooling tower operation. The experimental result shown that the increasing of heater power will increase the temperature of cooling range in the cooling tower. The grid dependency study, medium was chosen because the convergence time is not too long and the rate of error for the medium mesh is inside adequate range from 7% to 20%. For validation of data experimental and CFD was comparing and there are 18.48% more percentage accuracy between experiment and CFD.