Nowadays, main facilities used in heavy industry, including metallurgical, chemical and power generation industries, all use a large amount of heat energy, and they usually have water-cooling systems. A water cooling system has many advantages including its simple structure and low maintenance cost, but on the other hand, the use of low-temperature natural water as an input increases water consumption from the water source, which increases the overall operating cost of production process.
To reduce the operating cost, water consumption has to be reduced by introducing more effective water-cooling methods. But there are technical limitations to the minimum water consumption. Besides, as even the minimum water consumption contains a certain amount of potential energy, recycling of hot cooling water is very important to reduce the energy consumption level of the whole production process.
Since long ago, natural cooling ponds such as rivers and lakes or artificial cooling ponds have been widely used to recycle the hot water from the output of a water-cooling system. However, due to the low cooling effect of traditional cooling ponds and the limited ratio of land occupation, extra cooling facilities are needed.
Introducing high-efficiency cooling ponds to further raise the cooling effect is a good way of reducing the surface area of cooling ponds and energy consumption for urban and other businesses on the limited surface area. Introduction of high-efficiency cooling ponds needs a methodolgy to uniquely design the structure and determine reasonable structural parameters that could satisfy the local climatic and geologic conditions.
Sin Sok Chol, a researcher at the Faculty of Metal Engineering, has proposed a concept of sectional cooling pond (SCP) of simple sectional region structure to raise the hot water-cooling effect without any extra cooling facilities and energy consumption.
In addition, he has conducted a mathematical modeling and CFD analysis of the recycling process of cooling water in the SCPs, thus proving their cooling effects and providing a way of determining reasonable structural parameters for them.
Introduction of SCPs enables recycling of cooling water required by production processes without the need for additional surface area and cooling equipment and energy consumption.
© 2021 Kim Chaek University of Technology