TABLE OF CONTENTS The use of water as a cooling medium has been long established, but its importance, in an industrial sense, was emphasized with the introduction of steam power. Cooling ponds are still widely used and spray ponds, which incorporate a degree or so of evaporative cooling, can be found, but the increasing requirement for control on water-cooling temperatures heralded the development of the modern cooling tower. The cost of land and the increasing expense of abstracting and of returning water, as well as its availability, ensured that the engineering and design techniques employed were sufficient to satisfy the economic factors imposed by these constraints.
The state of the art in cooling tower design is being constantly improved. Correctly designed, installed and maintained, today's cooling tower still remains the optimum selection in the great majority of cases where heat dissipation is required.
Historically, the first pack designs were random timber, to be followed rapidly by ordered timber splash bars. The concept of filming water as opposed to splash or concrete originated in England in the 1930s. The introduction of plastic packings dates from the 1950s, but this was confined to mechanical-draught towers until the 1970s, when experiments started with plastic packs in natural-draught cooling towers. Asbestos cement in flat sheets, corrugated sheets and flat bars, although widely used in the past, are now out of favour on health grounds in most developed countries. Plastic-impregnated...
