Estudo do comportamento térmico da torre de resfriamento da indústria de Cimento Apodi - unidade Quixeré

Abstract

In industry, cooling towers are often used to cool industrial water in its processes through direct contact with the air. In this work a thermodynamic analysis of a cooling tower, responsible for water cooling, was performed in a cogeneration system installed in a cement industry. The heat and mass transfer was analyzed to find the number of heat transfer units (NTU) and estimate the amount of evaporated water in the system. In order to model the conservation of energy and mass, the main physical phenomena involving mass transfer by evaporation were taken into account. In order to numerically model the tower, it was divided into small control volumes, where for each control volume the conservation equations for water and atmospheric air are applied. The solution was obtained through the use of an algorithm, implemented in Python and using the CoolProp library to determine the thermodynamic properties along the cooling tower. The model showed a difference of 6,467% between the estimated water flow and the daily replenished water flow and found a NTU of 11,784% lower than the ASHRAE NTU.