Evaporative cooling towers play an important role in green buildings by significantly reducing energy consumption when they supplement or replace traditional air conditioning systems, thereby reducing carbon footprint and operating costs. Although evaporative cooling is great at saving energy, it does consume some water, but the benefits on energy savings outweigh the water usage, which in some places is a scarce resource.
Water conservation is therefore a high priority in designing and operating water-cooled equipment and plays an important role in USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification and other sustainability programs. LEED assigns credit points to reduce water usage.
Two Design Paths
The LEED options for reducing potable water consumption in cooling towers can be separated into two strategies:
Get more use from the potable water.
The first strategy is directed at maximizing the use and value of each gallon of potable water used in evaporative cooling by optimizing the cooling tower’s cycles of concentration (COC). The success of this strategy and the ease or difficulty of implementing it is highly dependent on the quality of the available potable water.
Substitution of non-potable water.
The second LEED recommended strategy — which can be combined with the first — is to substitute non-potable water, such as HVAC condensate or rainwater, for some portion of the total water consumed. Analogous to the use of solar and wind as “alternative energy” sources to replace or supplement fossil fuel consumption, the use of non-potable water acts as an “alternative water” source, replacing potentially scarce drinking water. Obviously, the viability of this approach depends on the types of available non-potable water sources.
4th Edition of International Design Research Awards
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