iIMPROVEMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ROTARY COOLING TOWER

enchance the environmental and economic performance of dry cooling towers. The work has concentrated on dry cooling towers utilizing periodic water to air heat exchangers. Periodic towers have sheet metal discs partially submerged in hot, power plant condenser effluent. As the discs rotate, the discs alternately absorb heat from the effluent and discharge heat to the air. The means of heat transfer on the air side can be either evaporative and/or convective, depending upon the amount of eff-luent carried into the air side on the surface of the plates. An oil layer, floated on the water's surface, has been shown to be effective in eliminating water carry-over to the air side. The advantages of the periodic tower lie in the low cost of the discs and the ability to operate dry. A periodic tower should be signi-ficantly less expensive than a conventional dry tower fabricated with finned tubes. Further, since the periodic tower can also operate wet, by removing the oil film, the high capacity losses incurred during warm months by conventional dry towers can be eliminated. In the past year, the five foot diameter rotor matrix fabricated during the previous year was parametrically tested and evaluated in the full scale test facility. The rotor's performance deviated from the prior, simplified analysis, necessitating a more complex analytic system model. Such a model was developed, and agrees with the data, within the data's experimental accuracy. Oil studies were performed to identify (1) the prevalent mechanism