Efficiecy of Cooling Tower Fans
Efficiecy of Cooling Tower Fans
(OP)
Gentlemen, Cooling tower fans have 4 blades, typically 60 inches long 15 inches wide and of a fixed section for the full lenght without any change to the "angle" of the blade. Such a blade must be extreemly inefficient as a rotating "wing". Please can anyone hazard a guess as to the possible efficiency of this fan compared with an aerodynamic designed one. My thoughts are that for something running constantly the wasted power (cost) must be very sizeable, and a correctly designed profile blade would soon recover the initial outlay.
Any comments much appreciated.
Corrosionman
Any comments much appreciated.
Corrosionman





RE: Efficiecy of Cooling Tower Fans
There is a pretty interesting post in the HVAC/R engineering forum on cooling towers.
RE: Efficiecy of Cooling Tower Fans
I've been around cooling towers whose blades' "angle" did vary along their length. They had blocks cast in to provide a flat reference surface to set intallation angle.
Might have been longer than 5 foot.
Here's some spx/Marley info about Cooling tower fans as small as 54 inch Dia with "true twisted airfoil" design.
It's from this literature -
http://spxcooling.com/pdf/PRG-08.pdf
On page 36 there is a fan for low noise applications that appears to have uniform shape, but also mentions low tip speed, which would be a powerful tool to make a low noise fan.
RE: Efficiecy of Cooling Tower Fans
B.E.