The amount of heat generated by a building, residential or not, calls for cooling towers that will reject heat from these buildings. The enormous level of heat is generated by electrical equipment from within the building, the heat generated by humans, and the heat simply generated by the sun. Cooling towers are complex machines with a lot of moving parts. We are going to discuss a specific and vital piece of this machine called the drift eliminator.
The white clouds that exude from cooling towers may appear as smoke, but it is actually moisture, specifically the water molecules that evaporate from within the cooling tower to the outside world. Water losses associated with evaporation can be quite large.
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These water losses are referred to as drift. A drift eliminator is used to greatly reduce these losses.
Drift eliminators are made up of parallel blades situated on the discharged side of the tower to eliminate and drain water droplets from the air stream that exits. The drift eliminator's shape allows the built-up water droplets to transform many times before being discharged out of the cooling tower. As air flows inside the eliminator uninhibited, water droplets affect the drift eliminator, condense, and then travel downwards onto the fill and into the basin of the cooling tower.
Drift eliminators drastically reduce water losses, reclaiming as much evaporated water as possible.
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