Revolutionizing Cooling Towers for Sustainability

A cooling tower is a piece of mechanical equipment used to lower the water temperature by transferring heat to the surrounding air.  Cooling towers operate mainly through evaporative cooling.  Warm water for the process or HVAC system, such as a chiller or condenser, is sprayed over a structured surface called fill, which increases the contact area between the water and the air.  As air flows through the tower via fans a portion of the water evaporates.  The energy required for evaporation is drawn from the remaining water, lowering its temperature.  The cooled water is then recirculated back to the system to absorb more heat.

The tower provides comfort cooling for several buildings on our Ipswich campus and also supplies cooling water to the walk-in freezer systems.

Our previous cooling towers had reached their end of life, which presented an opportunity to improve efficiency in electricity and water consumption. The new towers are supplied with induction fans, which require half the motor horsepower to provide equal cooling capacity and result in significant savings in electrical costs.  

Both the previous and new towers utilize a chemical-free water treatment system which allows us to discharge the rejected non-contact cooling water back to the watershed via an underground leach field, keeping approximately 2 million gallons of water within the watershed annually.

The inclusion of sustainability goals at the onset of the project allowed for the project team to prioritize efficiency and reduced utility consumption into the selection of equipment, and in this case the more efficient towers were selected with no increase to overall project cost.