Comparison of methods for measurement of cooling tower drift

Abstract An international comparison of methods for measurement of cooling tower drift has been performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Participants from Belgium, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany participated in measurements of a spectrum of test environments, which span the range of cases which would typically be encountered in operating cooling towers. The environments differed according to droplet mass flux, droplet size distribution and gas speed. A wind tunnel was built to provide the various test environments, and a special optical drift measurement system was built to permit simultaneous monitoring of the environment sampled in the tests. Cases tested included both mechanical and natural draft cooling tower environments. Among the types of instruments tested are the pulsed laser light scattering system (PILLS), sensitive paper and other sensitive surface droplet impaction systems, isokinetic drift mass flux measurement systems and photographic systems. The results indicate that the instruments tested vary widely in their capabilities, with droplet sizing instruments being more effective in low load, small droplet size spectrum situations, and isokinetic mass and chemical assay techniques being most accurate in high load, large droplet distribution cases. Instruments relying upon thermodynamic state measurements in most cases agreed mutually within an order of magnitude. Their major source of error is believed to arise in the measurement of the gas stream relative humidity. This quantity is necessary for inferring the drift mass flux from the measurement provided by such instruments, which is the mixture saturation deficit or excess. For these tests the relative humidity was typically ⩽ 98%.