Dry cooling towers as condensers for geothermal power plants

The aim of this paper is to present scaling laws for a dry natural draft cooling tower by modelling the heat exchanger and the tower supports as a porous medium. Porous medium modelling of the tube bundles that allows a vigorous theoretical analysis of the problem is adopted. Scale analysis is used as the theoretical tool to study the problem of turbulent free convection through the heat exchanger bundles and along the cooling tower chimney. Results are then compared with full numerical simulation of the problem to observe splendid agreement. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved