Atmospheric refrigerants. Direct dry aerorefrigerant

From primitive societies to the present day, human activities have always generated heat emissions that have had to be evacuated to cooler environments.

The advent of transport and the industrial developments of the last few centuries have further accelerated the need to exchange heat with the environment to ensure the durability and operating efficiency of increasingly complex installations.

The two main ambient media used for cooling are :

• water from rivers, lakes and seas;

• atmospheric air.

In this dossier, we're only interested in devices that exchange air with the atmosphere, also known as air coolers.

Air coolers are used both in oil refineries and in the automotive industry for engine cooling, for example. Only industrial applications requiring medium-power air coolers (from 1 to several hundred megawatts) are covered here.

As the air cooler is part of an industrial unit, its characteristics must obviously be determined in such a way as to satisfy the technical constraints associated with the installation to which it belongs, in particular :

• the type and flow rate of the fluid to be cooled ;

• thermal power to be discharged ;

• inlet and outlet temperatures of the fluid to be cooled ;

• available space and neighborhood (noise level, etc.).

In order to guide the engineer's choice among atmospheric cooling systems, this dossier presents the dry direct air cooler:

• operating principle ;

• the state of the art ;

• sizing principles ;

• advice on installation, commissioning and operation.