Research of technical and economic performance of plastic capillary mats used as the heat exchanger of a closed-circuit cooling tower

Highlights: • Plastic capillary mats are firstly introduced to closed-circuit cooling towers. • Invention of capillary mats structure meets the demand of heat transfer and flow. • Test results of PE capillary mats proved that the theoretical method is right. • Comprehensive performance of closed-circuit cooling towers has been improved. -- Abstract: Closed-circuit cooling tower (CCT) using plastic capillary mats as heat exchanger can solve two important problems i.e. frozen and corrosion. Besides it has advantages of less tube weight, low noise, and inhibition scale. In this paper a CCT using polyethylene (PE) capillary mats as heat exchanger was designed and tested. Results show that traditional equations of evaporation cooling can be used to calculate the performance of closed-circuit cooling towers (CCTs) using plastic capillary mats. On this basis, comparisons of the heat dissipating capacity and cost was made about CCTs using five kinds of heat exchangers (exchangers with capillary mats of PE, thermally conductive polyethylene (TPE) and thermally conductive polypropylene (TPP), stainless-steel tubes and copper tubes respectively). Their heat dissipating capacity ratio of five CCTs is 66:83:89:96:100. Their cost ratio is 103:125:174:86:100. The paper also proved that CCTs with plastic capillary mats have better technical and economic performance.