The Midwest Towers Cooling Tower Blog

We wanted to take a moment and congratulate Composite Cooling Solutions L.P. (CCS). Based in Fort Worth, Texas CCS is a finalist for the 2012 Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce Small Business of the Year Award.

Cooling tower construction has evolved over time as environmental concerns and new materials have become available. Although FRP is now the preferred building material, the transition from wood cooling towers to more durable materials is an interesting journey beginning with redwood construction.

In our last cooling tower fundamentals post we covered some of the basic cooling tower components. In this cooling tower fundamentals article we will discuss the remaining basic cooling tower components and how cooling towers handle cold weather operations.

In our last two post we've covered what makes a cooling tower work and the basic types of cooling towers. We've touched on some of the basic cooling tower components in our last post, but in this cooling tower fundamentals post we'd like to dig a little bit deeper into the parts that make up a cooling tower.

All cooling towers are designed to remove waste heat from water and transfer it to the atmosphere, but there are a lot of ways to accomplish this task. Cooling towers can be categorized in a number of different ways, because there are so many differences between cooling towers.  For our purposes, we will cover three kinds of cooling towers based on how air and water flow (counterflow, crossflow, and hyperbolic)  and two types based on how the air is moved (mechanical and natural draft).

What Makes a Cooling Tower Work?

Chickasha, OK based manufacturing company supplies cooling tower components and custom fiberglass products.

As winter approaches, it seems prudent to cover some of the basics of cooling tower cold weather and freezing weather operations. This is especially important with counterflow towers because special procedures are required to minimize ice formation within a counterflow cooling tower when it is operated at or below freezing temperatures.  Otherwise, ice forms on the fill and drift eliminators.  A sufficiently heavy build up will cause damage to the fill, drift eliminators, or structural members.

Midwest Towers, Inc. is a 100% employee-owned manufacturer and supplier of components to over 85 U.S. cooling tower companies and contractors and more than 110 international companies the world over. Our world headquarters and over 200,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing facilities are located in Chickasha, just southwest of Oklahoma City, OK.

It may seem like a simple question, but sometimes we all need a review of the basics. So,