Cooling Tower

Cooling Tower

Plant equipment that is used to dissipate heat into air rather than into a river. Cooling is induced in two different ways. For binary plants, dry cooling towers use fans to draw air across a heat exchanger and this removes heat from a working fluid causing gas to condense into liquid. In flash steam plants, wet cooling towers condense water vapor via evaporation to provide a continuous supply of cooled water that is run through the outlet of a condensing turbine.

Geothermal Glossary

Word of the Week – Conduction

Word of the Week – Conduction

Conduction For geothermal applications, this refers to heat transfer in solids where thermal energy flows via microscopic-submicroscopic collisions of particles, which at a macro level is seen as solid-state diffusion. A vertical conductive thermal gradient is linear...

Word of the Week – Convection

Word of the Week – Convection

Convection Refers to heat transfer by fluid circulation in permeable rocks where thermal energy is transported with the flow of hot fluid (water or steam).

Word of the Week – Cyclone Separator

Word of the Week – Cyclone Separator

Cyclone Separator A large cylindrical vessel attached to two-phase production pipelines in geothermal fields that is used to separate dry steam from a fast-moving two-phase fluid. Steam separation results from cyclonic fluid flow, centrifugal force and gravity.

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