page_title: Cooling tower
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Cooling tower / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration showing "Barnard's fanless self-cooling tower", an early design of a large cooling tower used in combination with steam engine condensers. For more details and key to the lettering, see source at Section 29:Page 39. (Digitally cleaned up by the uploader)
context_page_description: A cooling tower is a heat rejection device that rejects waste heat to the atmosphere through the cooling of a water stream to a lower temperature. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove process heat and cool the working fluid to near the wet-bulb air temperature or, in the case of closed circuit dry cooling towers, rely solely on air to cool the working fluid to near the dry-bulb air temperature.
  Common applications include cooling the circulating water used in oil refineries, petrochemical and other chemical plants, thermal power stations, nuclear power stations and HVAC systems for cooling buildings. The classification is based on the type of air induction into the tower: the main types of cooling towers are natural draft and induced draft cooling towers.
  Cooling towers vary in size from small roof-top units to very large hyperboloid structures that can be up to 200 metres tall and 100 metres in diameter, or rectangular structures that can be over 40 metres tall and 80 metres long.
context_section_description: Cooling towers originated in the 19th century through the development of condensers for use with the steam engine. Condensers use relatively cool water, via various means, to condense the steam coming out of the cylinders or turbines. This reduces the back pressure, which in turn reduces the steam consumption, and thus the fuel consumption, while at the same time increasing power and recycling boiler-water. However the condensers require an ample supply of cooling water, without which they are impractical. The consumption of cooling water by inland processing and power plants is estimated to reduce power availability for the majority of thermal power plants by 2040–2069. While water usage is not an issue with marine engines, it forms a significant limitation for many land-based systems.
  By the turn of the 20th century, several evaporative methods of recycling cooling water were in use in areas lacking an established water supply, as well as in urban locations where municipal water mains may not be of sufficient supply; reliable in times of demand; or otherwise adequate to meet cooling needs. In areas with available land, the systems took the form of cooling ponds; in areas with limited land, such as in cities, they took the form of cooling towers.
  These early towers were positioned either on the rooftops of buildings or as free-standing structures, supplied with air by fans or relying on natural airflow. An American engineering textbook from 1911 described one design as "a circular or rectangular shell of light plate—in effect, a chimney stack much shortened vertically (20 to 40 ft. high) and very much enlarged laterally. At the top is a set of distributing troughs, to which the water from the condenser must be pumped; from these it trickles down over "mats" made of wooden slats or woven wire screens, which fill the space within the tower."
  A hyperboloid cooling tower was patented by the Dutch engineers Frederik van Iterson and Gerard Kuypers in 1918. The first hyperboloid cooling towers were built in 1918 near Heerlen. The first ones in the United Kingdom were built in 1924 at Lister Drive power station in Liverpool, England, to cool water used at a coal-fired electrical power station.
caption: A 1902 engraving of "Barnard's fanless self-cooling tower", an early large evaporative cooling tower that relied on natural draft and open sides rather than a fan; water to be cooled was sprayed from the top onto the radial pattern of vertical wire-mesh mats.
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