If you own a small building, you will not need to get a large industrial-sized cooling tower for your HVAC system. A small cooling tower will probably do the trick. These towers are used remove heat and send this waste process heat into the atmosphere, and a small cooling tower, or a couple of them, are sufficient for office buildings, schools, and most smaller structures that have HVAC systems.

But this is not the cases for large power plants, and industrial factories, such as petrochemical plants, oil refineries, thermal power stations, and other sizeable chemical plants. The cooling towers in these industrial facilities are helpful in removing heat from different sources, such as heated process material and machinery. Depending on the size of the facility, the cooling tower can be several feet wide and tall. The tallest one, towering at approximately 662 feet high, is located in Rajasthan, India, and is utilized by the Kalisindh Thermal Power Plant.

The type of cooling system used in these towers also varies based on a facility’s needs. While wet cooling towers use evaporative cooling, closed circuit cooling towers utilize both dry and wet processes. Dry cooling towers rely on dry air to cool the working fluid to near the dry-bulb air temperature. Wet closed circuit towers, or fluid coolers, are considered hybrids. Clean water is sprayed on working fluid that is passed through a tube bundle. Afterward, a draft is applied using a fan. The heat transfer this kind of tower performs has the advantage of protecting the fluid from environmental contamination and exposure like a dry cooler, but also offers similar results to a wet cooling tower.

To get the right cooling tower for your building, work with cooling tower suppliers to determine which cooling process would work best. In many cases, water-cooled towers on buildings are more efficient than air-cooled ones, because they can reject heat at or near wet-bulb air temperatures. Installing an energy-efficient cooling tower can also reduce water and energy usage, which could save you money. The most efficient cooler on the market might cost more, but the result will the worth the investment.