How ThermaCross Boosts Performance

As a new cooling tower fill, it is important to understand where ThermaCross fits in the pantheon of cooling tower fills. Remember, the first guide in fill selection should consider the water quality. ThermaCross, being a high efficiency cooling tower infill, is intended for clean water applications such as HVAC, district cooling, and treated industrial processes. As expected with its 19mm cross-fluted design, water qualities for which CF1900 qualifies are also appropriate for ThermaCross.

From a performance aspect, ThermaCross’ design helps to boost the cooling by maximizing the air/water contacting area without adding undue pressure drop. There are many 19mm cross-fluted fills available in the cooling tower market, and there are wide variations in those product designs that impact their cooling performances. For decades, Latino’s CF1900 has provided good efficiency with the combination of accurate honeycomb edges, 30° corrugations, and subtle rounded microstructure. Other competitive cooling tower fills have a sharply defined, aggressive microstructure, which, while improving the heat transfer characteristic of the cooling tower fill, adds detrimental pressure drop and reduces the amount of air available to affect the cooling performances. That type of design can end up providing less overall cooling. Yet other competitive fills have almost no microstructure, yielding a resultant lower total efficiency.

With its MicroBoost design, ThermaCross is able to achieve an improved heat transfer characteristic without the penalty of reduced airflow. This combination is the “Boost” in MicroBoost. The result is a fill that can provide improved cooling for field-erected towers built around CF1900. With a cooling tower design of 6ft (1.8m) of CF1900 and typical design conditions, ThermaCross can provide colder water not only at 6ft (1.8m) fill depth, but also even at a 5ft (1.5m) fill depth. For towers designed around 4ft of CF1200, the boost in heat transfer and the additional airflow also help ThermaCross keep pace, and potentially even outpace, CF1200 in those towers. For towers designed around less than 4ft (1.2m) of CF1200, the additional surface area that CF1200’s 68ft2/ft3 (226m2/m3) provides for evaporative heat transfer will generally outweigh the MicroBoost given to ThermaCross, although at even 3ft (0.9m) ThermaCross can get close.

The place where ThermaCross really shines is lower water loading conditions. Its MicroBoost design provides the push to utilize as much of the fill’s surface area as possible based on the available water to be filmed out across it. Because of this, ThermaCross’ heat transfer characteristic at lower water loadings is markedly higher than competitive fills. The results can be dramatic and can open new doors as you design competitive towers for your customers.