Wind leading to improve cooling performance of natural draft air-cooled condenser

Highlights: • Windbreakers are proposed and studied for natural draft air-cooled condenser (NDACC). • Heat rejection of NDACC rises with windbreakers, especially at high wind speeds. • Case B reduces uneven airflow distributions locally, but has little thermal benefits. • With more windbreakers, cases E and F have nearly same best cooling performances. • Case F windbreakers are recommended considering the robust and economic operation. Natural draft air-cooled condenser (NDACC) has been adopted in chemical and power plants owing to its superior energy-efficient operation to the traditional fan-driven air-cooled condenser. However, the cooling capability of NDACC is generally impaired by ambient winds, which incur the unbalanced airflow distributions through the condenser cells. So, the wind flow fields are organized in this research to restrain the adverse wind effects. By numerical simulations, five types of windbreakers are studied and compared with the no-windbreaker case. The air velocity, pressure and temperature distributions, and the specific air flow rates of condenser cells as well as heat rejections of cooling sectors are analyzed. Furthermore, the three-dimensional path lines are additionally presented to highlight the leading effects of windbreakers, airflow inside the tower, and flow discharge at the tower outlet. The results show that, appropriate windbreaker configurations can effectively improve the cooling performance of NDACC, especially at high wind speeds, while the windbreaker arrangement inside the condenser cells plays a negligible role in the overall cooling performance. Besides, the cases with 12 and 48 exterior windbreak walls achieve almost the same best performances. In consideration of the system robustness and economy, the case with 48 exterior windbreakers can be recommended in the future engineering application.