Fill Materials Dissipate Heat

Hey there friend, and welcome back to our blog. At Industrial Cooling Solutions Inc., we know a lot about cooling towers. This makes sense considering we are in the cooling tower business, but we don’t want to keep all of this knowledge to ourselves. We are firm believers in sharing important information, and today we are going to talk about one of the most important components of industrial cooling towers. How important is this part? Well, considering it’s the reason that coolings towers work as efficiently as they do, we’d say it’s pretty important. To learn more, continue reading below!

Fill Makes the Chill

An industrial cooling towers single purpose in life is to dissipate excess heat. Unfortunately, heat is not the easiest thing to get rid of as anyone who has ever had to chill something quickly understands. When designing cooling towers that utilized spray nozzles to introduce water to the towers, designers hit a roadblock. They quickly figured out that the total time of contact that water had with the air could only be increased by increasing the height of the tower. Obviously certain limitation crop up when this is factored into cooling tower designs, so the engineers had to do a bit of brainstorming. After a while, engineers figured out that they simply needed to increase the rate at which the water and hot air were exposed to each other. To solve this issue, they came up with fill.

There are Two Basic Types of Fill Materials

The fill in an industrial cooling tower, is simply a media by which more water surface is caused to be exposed to the heated air, while also increasing the amount of time that the air and water are in contact with each other. The longer the water and air are in contact with each other, the higher the rate of heat transfer. While both types of fill media perform the same function, they do so in different ways.

• Splash-fill: Splash-fill dissipates heat by causing the flowing water to pass over multiple elevations of parallel splash bars. By continuously interrupting the flow of water falling through the tower, the amount of time the air and water contact each other is increased. Splash-fill is a very popular fill media for crossflow towers, as it allows more room for error in terms of nozzle efficiency, but the fact that splash-fill provides little resistance to horizontal airflow, it is rarely used in counterflow cooling towers.

• Film-fill: Film-fill dissipates heat by allowing water to flow in a thin film over vertically placed sheets that are spaced very closely together. These sheets usually have ridges in them to further disrupt the flow of air and water, further extending the amount of time that they are exposed to each other. Film-fill has become an increasingly popular fill media because it allows a greater amount of water surface to be exposed within the given volume of the cooling tower. Almost all fill media used in counterflow cooling towers is film-fill

We hope that these explanations have shed a little more light on the types of fill media that can be used for industrial cooling tower applications. At Industrial Cooling Solutions Inc., we are experts in the cooling tower industry. We have completed multiple successful projects around the world, and can handle any cooling tower job that you can throw at us. To learn more about our services, products, or just cooling towers in general, visit our website. We are certain that once you see our track record, we will be your first choice for your next industrial cooling tower project.