Could it be ‘curtains’ for cooling towers?

Cooling towers have been used to dissipate heat from ventilation, air-conditioning, and heating systems in hospital applications for decades, but change is afoot. Here, Matthew Griffin, adiabatic cooling specialist for Transtherm Cooling Industries, explains the shift change towards dry/wet evaporative cooling methods for NHS Trusts and private healthcare environments, exploring the key concerns of Legionella control, energy and water efficiency, noise reduction, and retrofitting. 

Better energy efficiency standards, water conservation, noise reduction and, most importantly, the risk assessment and control of Legionella and other waterborne pathogens, have shrouded resource and OPEX-hungry cooling towers in an evolving stream of HSE compliance and expansive maintenance and local authority reporting procedures. 

In recent years, many Trust specifiers, working on both new construction projects and rolling refurbishment programmes, have moved in favour of more efficient cooling technologies. Some opt for hybrid coolers, which combine a small amount of dry cooling, using oversized heat exchange coils, with the evaporative cooling methods of a traditional cooling tower, while many are waking up to the superior capabilities of adiabatic cooling technologies. Adiabatic coolers are capable of minimising the growth of dangerous pathogens, eradicating the use of costly and environmentally harmful chemicals, and considerably reducing the labour-intensive maintenance and reporting procedures associated with less advanced cooling tower technology. To better understand this significant specification shift change, let us examine those key drivers.