Experimental performance of a turbo-compression cooling system operating under power plant conditions

Abstract

Power generation assets consume tremendous amounts of water in the United States, using 40% of all freshwater withdrawals. Although most of this water is recycled within the plants, approximately 4% leaves the site via evaporative cooling towers. This evaporating water represents a strong opportunity to provide substantial water savings, especially for water constrained regions such as the desert southwest. A common water reduction option is to replace the evaporative cooling towers with air coupled condensers, but the size and cost of the air-coupled heat exchangers often makes this option prohibitive. One method to enable air-coupled heat exchange is to offset a portion of the condenser cooling load with a waste heat activated cooling system. The team at Colorado State University has recently developed an experimental Turbo-Compression Cooling System (TCCS) at 250 kWth cooling scale which can operate under unique power plant operating conditions (i.e., Twaste=106°C, Tamb=15°C, and Tcool=17.2°C). The present study provides experimental results for the TCCS over a range of cooling water temperatures and ambient temperatures to fully characterize system performance. The highest COP obtained for the system was 2.07 and occurred with ambient temperature of 21.4°C and ambient to cooling water temperature difference of 1.4°C.