Practical Engineering - 2024-11-05
A pretty creative way to cool lots of water... 🌌Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/Practical-Engineering 🚢Watch The Raising of the Titanic: https://nebula.tv/videos/neo-the-raising-of-the-titanic?ref=practical-engineering In a world full of straight lines and right angles, I love that every once in a while, it just makes good engineering sense to use curvy shapes to accomplish a really important job. Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/practical-engineering-why-are-cooling-towers-shaped-like-that Signed copies of my book (plus other cool stuff) are available here: https://store.practical.engineering/ Practical Engineering is a YouTube channel about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that ‘like’ button, give us a comment, or watch another of our videos! CONNECT WITH ME ____________________________________ Website: http://practical.engineering Twitter: https://twitter.com/HillhouseGrady Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/practicalengineering Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PracticalEngineering Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PracticalEngineerGrady Patreon: http://patreon.com/PracticalEngineering SPONSORSHIP INQUIRIES ____________________________________ Please email my agent at practicalengineering@standard.tv DISCLAIMER ____________________________________ This is not engineering advice. Everything here is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Contact an engineer licensed to practice in your area if you need professional advice or services. All non-licensed clips used for fair use commentary, criticism, and educational purposes. SPECIAL THANKS ____________________________________ This video is sponsored by Nebula. Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images, Shutterstock, Pond5, and Videoblocks. Music by Epidemic Sound: http://epidemicsound.com/creator Tonic and Energy by Elexive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6fBPdu8w9U Video by Grady Hillhouse Edited by Wesley Crump Produced by Ralph Crewe Graphics by Nebula Studios
Now I want to see a cooling tower cooled gaming pc.
I think the channel called major hardware did this awhile back
data centers. Where i work we use a cooling tower to chill water for a water chilled A/C which cools a computer room. Thus cooling tower cooled computers
I think over a decade ago LTT did a video on doing just that. Even before then I know in the early 2000's some guys were playing around with this system. Generally speaking it did work but it made the room very humid and eventually would stop working without another system in place to take out all the humidity and cool the room back down.
For a while, bong coolers were a thing lol. They're not shaped like nuclear plant towers, but they cool down water cooled PCs with a tall evaporative tower that showers water down and blows air up
Good idea 😂
Grady: "I'm going to build one in my garage!"
Grady's wife: "Just the cooling tower, right?"
Grady: 🙂
Later on...
Grady: "Oh no. They found me. I don't know how, but they found me."
Grady's wife: "Who are you talking about?"
Grady: "The Libyans! They got me the Uranium for the reactor!"
Grady's wife: "You told me you were just building a "cooling tower"!"
Wait a minute Grady
Are you telling me you built a power station…
IN OUR GARAGE?
@@Hybris51129 Plutonium not uranium! C'mon Marty!
@@dieselhead24 I don't think Grady would be building a bomb though. The man does have some limits.
David Hahn flashbacks.
As an operations supervisor at a thermal power plant this is awesome and will be referenced when training new employees and refreshing the senior operations employees. Thank you!
Yes, I wish they showed this video when I went into my initial training.
@ the most common question I get is why the cooling tower is shaped that way. I can get through it but no where near this fluidly
@@Andrew_Greggi always thought they had some fans inside the tower to force air flow from bottom to the top, but i had no idea it was all a natural fluid flow with NO moving parts. the hyperboloid shape, which i thought to be very fragile, turned out to be stronger... and thats how its so thin and structurally stable. they could still create a natural draft out of a simple cylindrical tower but ofcourse the primary concern would was the structural integrity, solved by such simple yet genius shapes.
Kinda blows my mind that a power plant would hire someone without 4+ years of formalized education on these topics/charts. XD. Not to discount how amazing Grady's vids are...just the bar is at a different level than I suspected.
@@frollard Unfortunately there isn't an unlimited supply of perfectly qualified people just waiting to apply for the jobs you have. Usually taking an inexperienced but capable person and training them up yourself is a much better option than having nobody at all, which usually results in other employees burning out, leaving, and making the problem even worse.
Having worked on these towers on several uk power plants on the packing and efficiency of the cooling towers, one thing that you could add to your video is why the condensers are used and it’s not just to cool the steam back to water as that is counter intuitive, the real reason for doing this is to do with the properties of steam and water, 1L of water expands to 1000L of steam, the turbines have 3 sections, high pressure, medium and low pressure then to the condenser. The cooling of the condenser causes the steam to turn back to water, contracting by 1000 times, creating a negative pressure causing the turbine to spin faster generating more power and the reduced pressure means the steam remains steam at 50 degrees C. The cooling allows an increase of up to 50MW from each 500MW generating unit. The efficiency of the pack and cooling of the tower water greatly affects this gain ie if a cooling tower has lost efficiency amounting to loss of 5 degrees of cooling costs based coal fired units was £100k per degree, per tower, so on a plant like Eggborough with 8 towers around £4mill per year. The more the cooling of the condensers the greater the vacuum therefore the more power generated from the same ton of coal
Oh wow, that's incredibly interesting. I'm starting out as a performance testing engineer, great to have this golden insight from you!
That's cool thanks for sharing
this really needs to be higher
"It's basically a cloud machine" I jokingly told my son when he was two the small power plant we drive past was Cloud Factory. He's 6 now he knows its a power plant but he still calls it the cloud factory.
Well ain't that sweet.
A good example of the old adage "sometimes a little inaccuracy saves tons of explanation."
@@vink6163my kids are 6 and 7, and the truth in that statement 😂😂😂😂
Lol my brother told a former coworker of his asked him, "What's the big fans that Texas built a lot of" and his response was, "When it gets too hot, they turn those on to cool us down"
Nuclear power plant computer case
There are lots of knowledgeable engineers out there, but very few of them are also great teachers. That’s a rare combination of talents and it’s so appreciated.
It’s a parabola! Just that, nothing else….
…nothing else.
@@davemccage7918 hyperbola*
he's bad at explaining things but ok.
@@davemccage7918 hyperbola
@@cipherhunt3063 or your bad at comprehending technical things. But ok your not?
I am but a humble farmer...but I use a psychrometric chart to judge when to turn on the fans on my grain silo to dry grain. Here in Southern Australia we have hot dry summers (which is when we harvest) and rarely need to dry grain...but when we do have a wet summer I have a silo (bin) with a high capacity fan that just uses ambient air (no added heat), so a psychrometric chart and a wet bulb thermometer helps guide the process.
How long does it typically take for a harvest to dry out? Is it in the scale of days? Months? Years?
@jimmydesouza4375 Our drying bin holds about 70 tonnes (155,000lbs) of cereal grain (eg wheat). Typically with warm, low humidity conditions, with the fan running only during the day, it will take up to a week a to drop the moisture content by 1%. We rarely put grain that is more than 15% moisture in it and it needs to be under 12.5% to be saleable.
Can’t you hook up a thermostat-like reader to automate the process?
Yes....but they are expensive and we don't use it often enough to be worth it.
Thanks!
I was already impressed by the models you build in your garage, but that hospital you built at 12:08 just to show us how cooling towers are used in HVAC really takes the cake!
I bet he can explain how a fan blade moves air. Sound so complicated, that you can't understand it. Even though you already know how a fan blade moves air.
It wasn't just the model hospital, but the whole diorama was breathtaking. Did you see the mini-highway off in the distance, it looked so good.
Grady, saw what you did there...
Holy! It has "Grady" written on the top!
Its Not Cake.
We used to bathe in the "river" coming from the cooling towers when I was a child. :))) It was hot water. It was especially nice on winters.
Yeah so much fun touching butts with dorks. Miss those days.
Lake Anna in Virginia was built specifically for this purpose. Well, cooling a nuclear plant, not bathing. But it’s crazy warm, and lovely to swim/boat in.
Manatees in Florida love the warm water from power plant discharge.
Very strange, usually it was pipes. I used to bath in real river that gets splashed by cooling water from the powerplant, whirlpools all around
They do this for the geothermal plant in iceland, its legitimately a tourist destination
7:00 I'm an HVAC professional and I love seeing the psychrometric chart in a YouTube video! I design dehumidification systems for suspension bridge cables.
just use paper towels
That sounds like a pretty cool job.
@@AxDhan You joke, but that's effectively how desiccant dehumidifiers work. They soak up the humidity from the air, then you blast them with heat to dry them back out so that you can reuse them. Then you pack them in a wheel and rotate it through an airstream that you want to dry, and a separate airstream that dries them back out.
I had no idea dehumidification of suspension cables was a thing.
@@stupid1557 it wasn't until they figured out packing the cables with lead paste was a no-no. There's just no better way to keep cables from corroding. The cables are made up of a ton of tiny wires, and there ends up being a lot of space between the wires in the cable for rain water to collect. But, if you seal the cable best you can and push dry air into the cable you can dry out the cable and prevent it from rusting.
One of the most advanced version of it is the Heller-Forgó Indirect Dry Cooling System. The water flows in a closed system of water-to-air heat exchangers built in the tower and does not evaporate. So there are not big clouds coming out of the tower. It is useful if you had produced deionised water with ion exchange, and you want to reuse it. It was invented by two Hungarian engineers László Heller and László Forgó.
won't the water absorb floating ions and therefore have to be deionized again?
Everything was invented by the Hungarians. :) (it's a joke, but true)
I love that you used a video of Grady Hospital. The reference to your self did not go unnoticed! A+.
One thing I love about Grady's video is that even if I already know about a subject, he seems to always find some information I don't know. Thank you, Grady, and I look forward to your next video.
Listening listening to him narrated is my favorite.
Same goes with me
Cooling towers are also great for concerts... I got to film a concert where the producer brought a 9 foot concert grand out to an unfinished nuclear cooling tower for a solo piano concerto. It was pretty amazing, because he used the incredible reverb to make his own acccompiment.
Was it in Tennessee by chance, or an unfinished plant elsewhere
In the early 1970s, I stood inside one of the cooling towers at the Rancho Seco Nuclear Plant, which was under construction near Sacramento, California. I don't remember an echo, but I was awed by the massive size (425 feet, or 130 m, tall). Cheers from Liz and Ginger (pic left) in Australia.
Rave in unfinished Ukrainian cooling tower in Crimea?
An additional benefit of hyperboloid shapes of cooling towers is mitigating vortex shedding. There is a specific combo of diameter of the tower and windspeed that resonates (like Tacoma Narrows Bridge). If the tower has variable diameter throughout its height, a bit of it is always resonating with any wind speed, but never the whole thing at once.
Fantastic explanation.
7:51 I know that water vapor goes upwards, from observation when cooking and from knowledge that clouds form in the sky, but I always thought that temperature is the driving factor for humidity to rise. It blew my mind to see this chart and hear your explanation, I really didn't expect water in gas form to be lighter than the other air molecules, though I should have know it from the position of hydrogen in the periodic table. Thank you, I learned something extra from this video!
Another place it come into play daily is for pilots, both small and large aircraft. Ends up being especially dangerous for small planes. Feels counterintuitive that humid air is less dense. Add hot summer temperatures and especially high humidity, and a plane sitting on the ground at an airport at a 3000' elevation may feel like it's at 6500' (called density altitude: pressure altitude corrected for temperature). A naturally aspirated plane with modest horsepower loaded up with people and bags will really struggle to both make engine power and for the wings to make lift.
@@MikeHalsall So hot&high should be ammended with hot&humid&high
@@NikolaiUA indeed - though the "pressure altitude" is the piece in the equation that also accounts for humidity. Essentially the weight of all the air molecules in the air column pressing down on me in my current spot... if it's more humid or less humid, the "weight" reading is still the weight and the humidity component of that is baked in. Temperature is not baked in, though (heh)... so pressure altitude (e.g. the difference between what 29.92 inHg at sea level of 0' and what the number actually needs to be set to to read 0' (or, say, the known airfield elevation)) plus correction for temperature is all that's needed.
There are actually five different types of altitude... pressure altitude, density altitude, indicated altitude, true altitude, and absolute altitude. Which makes it a bit confusing especially to new student pilots. But it's really about frames of reference... both the instrument's frame of reference and the plane's frame of reference to some other thing (including an imaginary line in the air at 18,000 feet when (in the US) pilots all set their altimeters to 29.92 so they don't have to be fiddling with it in cruise and you can have planes passing by each other with 1000' vertical separation at Mach .89).
@@MikeHalsall Got how the pressure alt accounts for humidity, but did not why it doesn't also do so for temperature, why isn't it baked in. If you have the same physical altitude, humidity, and all the other factors (save fot the temperature) fixed - doesn't changing (e.g. increasing) just the temperature alone make the air e.g. less dense and hence auto-increase the pressure alt reading?
Yeah, there's a bit to learn initially about altitudes, flight levels and altimeters (e.g. capt. joe had an altimeter video recently), but it surprises me there are fresh student pilots nowadays who come with 0 knowledge to the school from what I understand. You'd imagine an aspiring pilot would be an aviation enthusiast in the first place and would've belted hundreds of flight hours in a sim like MSFS or the likes before going to a flight school; and know the theory part from there.
@@NikolaiUA yeah great question - you've got it as "just the temperature alone make the air e.g. less dense and hence auto-increase the pressure alt reading"
Pressure altitude is based on a model that assumes a standard temperature profile in the atmosphere - that is, a standard temperature lapse rate, which is what everything is calibrated to. Using that pressure altitude is going to give me the correct altitude of where I'm at relative to sea level. i.e. on the ground, my altimeter reading will match the airport elevation.
When we put temperature into the equation (that density altitude) - let's say it's a super hot 100 degree day - now my plane will "feel" like it's much higher; e.g. airfield elevation is 2000' but now with the temperature thrown in, my plane "feels" like it's at 5000' (those are pretty real-ish numbers). But if I were to use that in my altimeter, I'd be reading I'm 3000' higher than I actually am.
If I actually used density altitude in my altimeter and I were in the clouds, I'd run into the ground 3000 feet before I should've. So I need that corrected-for-temp density altitude to tell me how my plane is going to perform, but I need pressure altitude reported by ground stations to tell me my altitude relative to the terrain around me.
I hope that makes sense? I'm just a private pilot with 400 hours, not a CFI or meteorologist :)
Basically 1/2 of an undergraduate course in thermodynamics covered in a 20 minute video. You are to be congratulated on your brevity, sir!
And you are not
But I agree with the sentiment here
@@elliotfitzgerald8950 That was rude and unnecessary.
Elliot's existence is rude and unnecessary@@pendlera2959
I'm a firefighter and I just ran a medical call at my local coal fired power plant last shift. My partner and I were in shock at the scale of the place and had so many questions about, of all things, the cooling tower! Thank you so much for putting this amazing content together!
We get a lot of that from people visiting the place I retired from. So impressed with the one thing that doesn't have any moving parts!
They're pretty insane. Blows my mind that people were able to design and build these things back before computers. You should see the maze of pipes, tubes, miles of wires, and somehow making room for people to get around and work on them.
Whats really cool is that the boilers are suspended in the air because they grow downwards when they're online and flex a lot. Which is something else we have to take into consideration when retrofitting, as things can get into a hell of a bind and break if you attack moving points together
Ours uses a lake for the condenser water, and most of the others use cooling towers, but not the cool looking ones that a lot of nuclear plants use
Great discussion. I worked at several plants in the northeast, and one thing you didn't quite touch on is water consumption. Yes, we use towers so we can 'recycle' the feedwater. But a large nuc plant might have to dissipate 2000 MW of thermal energy. That can mean evaporating water in the tower at rates like 13000 gallons / minute. Yes, over half a million gallons per hour. So having a source for that makeup water to the cooling system is a key to success.
Thanks for comfirming my suspicion. My personal estimate was about 2% lower.
This year was election year in my state. And the blue party seriously wanted to go nuclear+lignite for our electricity needs.
Those 6GW (net-)electricity essentially would have meant a water consumption of about 4 million people. Yes, I live in a quite rural state so each person just uses 100 l per day.
To illustrate how crazy such an idea is:
The state has about 3 million inhabitants. And we got a car factory in the last years. This car factory consumes water for about 40 000 people. The fuzz about this water usage even made international headlines.
BTW a dry tower would generate quite a big wind. 🤣
@@reinhardtreinsch2923 It’s important to remember that every power production method has its downsides. Is water scarce is your state?
@@ShaqsNewGroove We have a low ground water capacity.
So if the rain is normal we can get along. But if you get two dry years in a row that´s a problem.
And a 100km+ water pipeline for the car factory plus the prohibition to water your garden are likely to happen.
So expanding your water consumption for power production is not smart 🤣.
Still nuclear is the best choice and you can do it without large cooling towers, you can have a (new) lake as a cooling source or have a hybrid.
And the plants don't need groundwater quality to supplement loops.
When we have tours, we explain that basically when there's a large plume, that essentially there is one swimming pool per minute coming out the top of our tower!
I had to design one of these once. As far as engineering hours go, it was the most expensive piece of equipment in the plant.
I wouldn't have guessed that. What sort of problems do you need to solve when designing one and what information do you need? What makes it so particularly time consuming? In my ignorance, it'd seem like a few equations would spit out an optimal solution given the volume of water to cool, maximun footprint, and maybe the climate at the location.
I would expect that once you have a cooling tower design, it can be replicated many times. Why reinvent the wheel every time?
@@timchambers5242the tower has to be scaled to be greater than the exact thermal requirements of the system and the weather of the local area. Procurement off the same equipment may be an issue also.
arrived requirements, foundation...
I visited a coal plant open day with my toddler some years ago. One tower at the time was out and was allowed in. You could see the sky above and heard the waters cascading down. In the pool below, amazingly, we saw ducks paddling.
8:47 "its not smoke its STEAM from from the STEAMED clams we're having, mmm steamed clams."
At this time of year? At this time of day? In that part of the power plant? Located entirely within the cooling tower?
i got fed misconceptions by captain underpants. in one comic went into a cooling tower and grew 1000x their size from the green radioactive liquid in the towers
@@ButtaDawg6969lol
Superintendent, I hope you're ready for mouth-watering hamburgers!
Steamed hams
9:14
Latent heat: Mentioned
Technology: Connected
Brilliant.
He should have bought 2 of them.
Brought to you by Menards! The Midwestern favourite
@@somedudesstuff801 built!
Hey. Have a great day. 💝
I'm not a HVAC technician. I consider myself a sewage engineer. But I will still watch all your videos because I like to have a look at all the other topics connected to public infrastructure. In Germany we call it "to have a look over the rim of ones plate." It helps you to get a better overall picture if you don't limit yourself to your own specific topic but look at your surroundings.
I do love German aphorisms.
Also, if American culture could adopt such sensibilities, maybe we wouldn't have done the awful, terrible thing we just did last night. I did all I could to prevent it, but I'm a poor Californian; I didn't have much to donate and my vote for Kamala meant nothing...
Who is Kamala? @@joshyoung1440
I learned more about cooling towers than I’ve ever learned in my life. Thank you
Nuclear worker here - this was tremendously insightful. I'll be at Comanche Peak next spring and it's cool to go in knowing all this.
Welcome to Texas!!
buckle up!
"I know that's a little bit in the weeds" listen man, I will follow you into any patch of weeds you care to name. enthusiastic nerdy people telling me all about the stuff they love to study is the best thing on youtube.
Yes! The weeds are great because it's more context than what I could get from, say, reading the Wikipedia page on thermal cooling towers
The weeds helped me understand the relation of even more of my chemical engineering topics in this video
I've read a paper from 1940s about structural integrity of these things, where the authors complained that the required thickness from calculations is so small, that would be technologically difficult to build the tower with such thickness. Another complaint was that the tower is hard to demolish :D
My last job,they were 52 yr old no probs, and due to their shape,they demolish easy and v v neatly
@@TheDigger06 Did you use explosives at the foundation? In that case I could imagine the shape being beneficial. What I saw in the paper was visibly distorted tower, which was still standing. It is possible they used more material than required at the time. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the paper and my memory of it is not 100%.
The tower's shell thickness is comparable to an egg's shell at scale....
@@tomasletal257I've seen videos of how they have to manually deconstruct power plants over the course of weeks. Don't know why they do it, maybe it's just regulations. Take my word with a grain of salt, though.
Scratch that, I read that it takes several years to decommission a nuclear power plant. Don't know about the towers, but they apparently can't just be blown up, cause of contamination.
@@astroyeaster9464 In case of nuclear power plant, the towers shouldn't be contaminated. Still, by blowing such tower up (its actually blowing down), you could affect contaminated areas.
Anyway, these towers are also used in non-nuclear power plants, where blowing up is an option.
I really like how the iconic cooling towers of thermonuclear plants have so much aesthetic and history attached to it, and under that layer there's a ton of engineering and efficiency at play. Surely, the people designing those structures would not make something that big and specifically shaped to just look pretty (that's an architect thing lol)
Hands down my FAVOURITE THING about this channel is the models.
They make it all sooooo real!
That and the seemingly authentic enthusiasm
Long time watcher, first time subscriber, I did it cause the beard. I don’t know why that pushed me over the edge. But it did. As a dad, and a voracious learner myself, I use your videos for “Learning Night-Featuring Dad” where I pull out a white board and teach my girls about a topic they choose (read:gently coaxed towards…sometimes), and I draw and talk them through how something works. There are sooo many things in this world even I (not as some sort of genius, but as a 40 YO man of a specific inclination) do not know or understand. Even giving them a cursory explanation of something gives them a leg up on understanding, further in the future. Thank you for your work, and thank you for helping me raise my girls (my wife says thanks too, she knows about us).
You're an amazing father!
W dad. I'm sure your daughters love you.
Keep up the good work.
Proactive parenting is important, and a key feature in child, parent relationship-
That is missing today in this social media, App, Game world we live in today.
Nice to see such a comment which surely deserves a thumb up.
In my region, this hot water is pumped through the city in winter for heating.
Should happen everywhere, this is clever but still a terrible waste. I've seen distilleries using pipes to heat greenhouses, much smaller scale.
We should also replace cars with public transportation and walkable cities. Unfortunately that sounds like communism, so it's impossible. Being incredibly wasteful is better for the economy. Numbers have to go up hahaha 🌈 @@florahibernica
@@robertschnobert9090 Move to Europe then you clown
@robertschnobert9090
How does not needing to look at the same terrain for 6 hours every time you want to visit your parents communism?
In Europe a 3 hour dive can send you to a different country easily! Depending on your "luck" I'm sure it could lead you through at least 3, probably even 4 countries
@@robertschnobert9090not everyone lives in cities mate.
I love how this morphed into an energy economics class.
I’ve never been impressed by ignorant journalists who often include shots of cooling towers whenever they are writing about pollution or environmental issues. It’s just water vapour- same as the clouds, not smoke from combustion.
Ya mean nukyaler electricity doesn't burn? 🔥🤯😱
If it was clean, they wouldn't be allowing millions of dollars' worth of water to just waft away. Recovery of condensate is easy and cheap when compared to the cost of fresh water.
@@340wbymagbut they aren't letting the boiler water waft away, its a totally seperate cooling cycle with normal water rather than the treated boiler water, which gets cooled through normal heat exchangers
I know what you mean, but water vapour is indeed a greenhouse gas. But it's got a very short permanence time in the atmosphere, depending on temperature. But you are still right, people misguidedly think is something from combustion, with "toxic stuff" , and journalists play on it. It's not cool. Pun intended.
There's usually a bit of clever photography where the photos are taken so that the light of the sun makes dark shadows on the clouds of water vapour, making it look like dirty smoke. Dirty tricks from dirty activists fooling most of the people most of the time.
I like the way you got Grady into it 12:09 - smart filming!!! 😎
I was going to say "12:08, I see what you did there" but you beat me to it.
Well played sir. Well played.
13:37 CANDU plant! All of the plants in Canada use lake or ocean cooling rather than cooling towers, but cool to see a reactor that is so familiar to me.
I used to work at opg and now I'm at Bruce!!! Neat to hear someone working in the same group also watching :)
In-land power plants will create their own ponds to cool the power plant. It's best to do this, than to heat a lake with fish in it.
@kevinyancey958 not if you have the largest lakes in the world. You only need to raise local temperatures by a few degrees and the fishing is great near the outlet due to the slightly warmer water keeping the big fish around.
You can see the same effect in your shower, if you have a curtain. If you take a hot shower and have a fine mist sprayer, you see the curtain get pulled into the shower. That's all because the air current created by the warm, most air rising and the cooler, drier air being pulled in to replace the air that rose. Even with hot water, you can create currents. Some old hot water heating systems didn't use a pump. Instead, the hot water would rise and draw the cooler water into the boiler, to be heated. It took longer to heat up the whole system this way, but worked nevertheless.
All plants here in Sweden are cooled by seawater, and obviously built on the coast. I always thought these were super foreign as a kid, and turns out that I was pretty much right. Besides stuff like hydro and wind, I've never seen another type of powerstation in sweden, so I can't say for sure there are none but I can say I have never seen one.
You blew my mind as an hvac tech. I would have guessed humid air fell!
Great content!
16:00 This is facinating, I live in Las Vegas and I always wondered why evaporative cooling like this wasn't super common for things here.
In Vegas regional cooling pipe systems for buildings to connect to ,really should be a good idea, how much of vegas electricity goes to hwac systems? I bet a lot ...
Because Las Vegas needs to recover every drop of water that they can.
We do have the Edward Clark Generating Station in Henderson on Russell and US95 (now called I-11). But it doesn't use big cooling towers, just small ones. It might be the fan type too, I can't tell from just seeing it from the freeway. I'm not sure what the power plants in Apex used, it's been a while since I been out that way. They shut the coal plants down, but I believe they have natural gas ones out there now. During the cooler months you see a lot of water vapor coming from them. I didn't see any tonight, it might be shut down for maintenance, or that electricity is not needed right now since it's not very cold. Most of our power is from outside the city, and this plant used to be outside the city at one time, but the city (cities) grew around it.
This is fantastic, and as an operations supervisor at a thermal power plant, I will use it as a guide when educating new hires and reviving senior operations staff. I'm grateful.
I was waiting to see if you covered the applicability of natural draft cooling towers to dry locations. Back when I first started working at nuclear power plants, I noted that both Palo Verde (which you showed) in Arizona where it is hot and dry, plus Columbia Nuclear in Eastern Washington where it is cold and dry, don't use natural draft towers All other nuclear plants in the US with towers have natural draft towers. I asked the mechanical engineers I worked with why and none could answer. Puzzling it over, I came to the same conclusion you did. It is the fact that the initial density goes down when the initial wet bulb temperature is low enough. Dumping the water in the tower will eventually warm things enough to cause a draft, but that results in a higher condenser back pressure and a lower plant efficiency. Well done video!
Just some minor points:
- Temperature is very important to efficiency, especially with nuclear power plants. The initial steam conditions at nuclear power plants is much lower than coal or oil, resulting in much more of the total work being done below atmospheric pressure. The pressure drop is low, but the volume is absolutely massive on those last few rows of blades. Combined cycle power plants care MUCH less due to the conversion of energy starting from combustion temperature. (That whole Carnot thing...)
- The name power plant engineers like to use for condenser cooling water is "circulating water". It is kind of descriptive, since it is just circulating around, never boiled.
- Nuclear plants don't use the natural draft tower for safety systems with the exception of some of them that do use it as a third or fourth tier backup. Cooling of safety critical equipment is desired to be absolutely redundant with nothing shared between diverse safety systems. In the case of plants cooled by natural bodies of water, they'll use the one body of water for all safety systems if it is very reliable (no upstream or downstream dams that could take it out, etc...). Most of the use redundant ponds totally separated from each other.
A good example of this extra source of cooling water is at Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. If you look to the south of the plant, there is a second earthen dam blocking off a cove. It has a high water outlet canal to the main reservoir. This extra cove can hold 30 days of shutdown water even if the main dam were to fail.
Thank you for taking time to add this excellent info! I'll offer just another small tidbit - There are other nuclear plants in the US with forced draft cooling towers, Farley in south Alabama and Hatch in south Georgia to name a couple.
The nuclear plant near Oswego NY is somewhat interesting in how it has both a cooling tower, and uses Lake Ontario for cooling.
Lake Ontario does have dams controlling its primary inflows amd outflow, but i doubt that posses a risk for the Oswego plant. Generally speaking the first powerplant draining the lake is a run of river facility, and the IJC tells them how much water to let flow down the river. (IJC = International Joint Commission of Boundary Waters) The IJC is trying to balance a lot of different needs ranging from ecology to recreation to commercial shipping.
A dam failure would be really bad, but not because it would rapidly drain the lake. Montreal is downstream and 1in change in depth to Ontario would raise the river at Montreal by 33ft, if Ontario suddenly dropped enough to expose the inlets at Oswego then Montreal was probably removed from the map. (And multiple dams had to fail at once)
Ultimately using the Great Lakes as your cooling source is like using an ocean except less angry. (No tides, tsunamis, or hurricanes/storm surge)
Loving your channel lately! i recently got into the civil engineering industry and love how relatable all your videos are. Keep it up!
Okay, I have to say that picture of the smoke stacks and cooling tower rising up out of the fog is absolutely beautiful.
Just to point it out, powerplants dont need to cool the water itself. They need to turn steam back into water, which needs a specific amount of energy like it did when it transitioned from water to vapor. Every joule more of cooling the water is energy lost you would have retained to turn it into electricity. The engineering is about to cool it exactly the right amount so it changes phases and not a joule more since no one wants to throw money out the chimney. Just in case it wasn't clear from the video.
You maybe don't have to, but you still very much want to. The lower you can get your condenser temperature, the lower the condenser pressure is and a lower condenser pressure increases efficiency.
Just like in refrigeration... the saturation point. Anything more and you're dealing with
subcooling or superheat.
he explained it just fine in the video
A nice explanation of minimising sub-cooling 👍
I wouldn't mind them throwing money out of the chimney. I would travel to my nearest power plant just to watch that.
1:00 RIP the bitrate
??
Explain
@@prathamchhetrivlogs3560 explaining how bitrate works would take to long but basically when there's a lot of random change on the screen, like that part of the video, youtube kills the quality in order to not skyrocket the bitrate.
So if you pause at 1080p, it might still look like 360p or 144p
My first thought when i saw the rain 😂
😂 I spit my water when this popped up
Your videos are always interesting. There is so much engineering around us that we don't normally take notice of, but it's so important to our lives and made by very clever people. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
8:25 "Ignoring the moving parts, it has no moving parts."😆😅🤣
6:39 it’s super easy to test. Most people probably have done this by accident. Fill a cup of water and leave it on the counter for a few hours. It will be colder than room temperature when you return.
5:35 I love that you are using a water heater leakage pan for the bottom of your home made cooling tower.
@PracticalEngineeringChannel - 2024-11-05
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@associatedblacksheepandmisfits - 2024-11-05
Was Grady on the building an easter egg ?😊
@marblemunkey - 2024-11-05
Question, assuming that I am already subscribed to Nebula (I am), as a creator does it help you more to watch you videos on TY or nebula?
@Vindortek - 2024-11-05
I just saw you in Bloomington IL! Love the videos man and thanks for making the event free to the public!
@michaelmayhem350 - 2024-11-05
Watched your video on nebula but came here to say when you said "I'm going to build one in my garage" I was all excited to get to see you build a miniature thermonuclear reactor in your garage and immediately had flash backs of the story of David Hahn. But your video didn't play out like that at all 😂🤣😂🤣
@Lewis-kf2pj - 2024-11-05
People say turbIne because there’s an I there, you bristol.