Evaluation of Strength and Local Buckling for Cooling Tower with Gas Flue

Abstract

The wind pressure on the surface of a cooling tower with gas flue is compared with the corresponding cooling tower without gas flue through wind-tunnel testing, then the characteristics of wind pressure distribution around the flue is investigated. The strength and buckling nearby the flue are analysed with finite element software. It is found that stress concentration nearby the flue is very obvious, and its safe factor of local buckling is much less than the value without flue, which makes unsafe place to transfers from top of the tower to the area near flue. The corresponding schemes of reinforcement on the basis of this situation are proposed, and static performance of each scheme is compared for selecting the better one.