Tata Consulting Engineers presents an AI-powered system that monitors cooling tower performance in real time, catching problems like scaling and mechanical failures before they happen. The solution tracks heat transfer, water chemistry, and atmospheric conditions to cut water use, reduce downtime, and lower auxiliary power costs.
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Tata Consulting engineers with decades of domain expertise in plant engineering has leveraged artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics to develop a digital point solution for cooling tower performance monitoring and diagnosis. This digital point solution can be used to monitor and diagnose cooling tower performance in various sectors including power and process. This innovative digital point solution helps improve cooling tower performance, assists in anomaly detection, provides root cause diagnosis, and hence improves the plant operation and profitability. Let's have a look at the functioning of a cooling tower. Conventional approach of cooling tower operation. Shortcomings in this approach. And finally, we will look at our innovative Digital Point solution. Cooling towers are widely used in process industries, power plants, and HVAC to reject process heat into the atmosphere. In a cooling tower, majority of the heat transfer takes place through evaporative cooling and balance by sensible cooling. During evaporative cooling process, water evaporates, lowering the temperature of the circulating water. Also, when the warm circulating water comes in contact with cold incoming air, sensible heat transfer takes place, causing the incoming air to heat up and the circulating water to cool down further. An industrial cooling tower consists of static and rotating parts, which can degrade over a period and may lead to thermal and mechanical performance issues. There are many factors influencing the performance of of a cooling tower: heat load, range, approach, inlet air wet bulb temperature, flow rate of circulating water, flow rate of air. Now let's look at how cooling tower operation is managed conventionally. The cooling tower performance degrades gradually over a period because of thermal or mechanical issues. it's difficult to quickly detect the actual root causes. Usually, the plant operators depend on cooling tower capability test to evaluate the cooling tower thermal performance. These tests are not conducted frequently unless there is a sharp degradation in the tower performance. The manual maintenance inspections rarely identify the symptoms of mechanical and vibrational issues well in advance, which may lead to failure of fans and associated rotating parts. Similarly, the water chemistry is monitored and maintained independently with respect to the thermal performance of the tower. This approach has few shortcomings: unnoticed creep in thermal performance, abrupt failures of mechanical components, delayed detection of scaling and deposition on fills and spray nozzle choking, excess blowdown. All these shortcomings can be addressed by a combination of data-driven an empirical approach. TCE has a developed Digital Point solution that can help the operator optimize their cooling tower performance. Now let us look at the Digital Point solution, its functions and features, and how it can help to overcome these shortcomings. The Digital Point solution can provide real-time monitoring of cooling tower key performance indicators. It can evaluate cooling tower capability for different atmospheric conditions. It can improve mean time between failures for mechanical components. The DigitalPoint solution can predict the optimum cooling water temperature for different load conditions. It can reduce water and auxiliary power consumption. The DigitalPoint solution also provides the early warning alerts and root cause analysis for any performance deviation. The recommendations from the DigitalPoint solution, along with the actions of the operator, will lead to optimum cooling tower operation and better maintenance. These features collectively improve the reliability and availability of the cooling tower, resulting in enhanced plant profitability. Tadek Consulting Engineers—your trusted partner for digital solutions. Stay tuned to this space to know more about our upcoming Digital Point solutions.
