Experimental study on the effect of number of waves in vane type drift eliminator with constant length on the collection efficiency and pressure drop of drift eliminator and compensatory water flow rate and cooling efficiency in the wet cooling tower

In this paper, the effect of using three drift eliminators with different number of waves in a constant total length on compensation water flow and thermal performance of cooling tower and collection efficiency and air pressure drop of drift eliminator is investigated. These drift eliminators were made of galvanized iron in three types: one wave(A), two waves(B) and three waves(C). Experiments were performed on the laboratory cooling tower under constant environmental conditions in terms of temperature and humidity, and parameters including: air mass flow rate, water mass flow rate and inlet water temperature to the tower was assumed as constant parameters. Validation of these experiments was performed by two methods with five repetitions for each type of drift eliminator and calculation of uncertainty of parameters derived from temperature and velocity. The results of this study show that the use of these drift eliminators can increase the collection efficiency by 48% and reduce the compensatory water flow rate of the cooling tower by 20%, which is due to a maximum reduction of 50% of droplets leaving the tower. On the other hand, the use of these drift eliminators increases the air pressure drop by 70% per wave and the cooling efficiency of the tower by 18.5%.