냉각탑 수질관리를 위한 자동화 시스템 개발

Cooling tower is an important equipment of the cooling systems for large buildings like factory and department store. Water used for cooling in cooling tower is reused continuously. If the water is polluted, corrosion and scale can happen at equipments and pipes. In order to prevent this problem, it is necessary to control the water quality using chemicals. To control the water quality, an automatic control system is designed, fabricated, and experimented. The control system is based on an imbedded microcontroller. Relays are used for power driving, an LCD and LED for display, and RS485 for remote data acquisition. Monitoring program is also developed for easy man-machine interface and extraction of data stored in the imbedded processor and EEPROM. The control system calculates amounts of chemicals necessary using sensor data and injects the chemicals into the cooling tower on proper time. The developed water quality control system is expected to reduce cost of maintenance and extend the lifetime of the cooling systems with low cost.