How many types of cooling towers are there?

I. Classified by ventilation method, there are natural ventilation cooling towers, mechanical ventilation cooling towers, and mixed ventilation cooling towers. II. Classified by the way hot water comes into contact with air, there are wet cooling towers, dry cooling towers, and dry-wet cooling towers. III. Classified by the flow direction of hot water and air, there are counterflow cooling towers, cross-flow (cross-current) cooling towers, and mixed-flow cooling towers. IV. Classified by application, there are cooling towers for general air conditioning use, cooling towers for industrial use, and high-temperature cooling towers. V. Classified by noise level, cooling towers are divided into ordinary type, low-noise type, ultra-low noise type, and ultra-quiet type cooling towers. VI. Others such as jet cooling towers, fanless cooling towers, hyperbolic cooling towers, etc.

1. Ventilation type: natural, mechanical, mixed. 2. Contact with air: wet, dry, and wet-dry. 3. Flow direction: counterflow, crossflow, mixed flow. 4. Shape: Round, square. 5. Noise level: Normal, Low noise, Ultra-low noise, Super silent. 6. Applications: air conditioning, industry, high temperatures.

The original poster’s title is quite concise, giving everyone some room for creativity. In our factory, cooling towers are used. There is a circular type, which is a counterflow cooling tower ； There is also a square one, which is a cross-flow cooling tower!

The commonly used cooling towers include counterflow towers, cross-flow towers, spray-ventilated fillless cooling towers, and closed-type cooling towers. A. Classified by ventilation method: natural ventilation cooling towers, mechanical ventilation cooling towers, and mixed ventilation cooling towers. B. Classified by the way hot water comes into contact with air: Wet cooling towers ； Dry cooling tower ； Dry and wet cooling towers. C. Classified by the flow direction of hot water and air: Counterflow cooling tower ； Cross-flow (AC) cooling tower ； Mixed-flow cooling tower. D. Other types of cooling towers: jet-type cooling towers and cooling towers that use a turntable to lift water for cooling.

To save energy, large cooling towers often use natural ventilation cooling towers, which consist of a ventilation shaft, diagonal struts, a ring base, a water spraying device, and tower core materials. Ventilation shafts are mostly reinforced concrete hyperbolic rotating shells, which possess good structural mechanics and fluid dynamics properties. The lower edge of the shell is supported by equally spaced V-shaped or X-shaped diagonal struts to form the air inlet of the cooling tower. The load on the shell is transmitted to the foundation through the diagonal struts. The foundation is often designed as a sloped ring foundation to withstand part of the circumferential tension transmitted from the inclined struts; it can also be constructed as separate individual foundations or pile foundations. The throat of the vent pipe has the smallest diameter; when calculating the compressive stability of the shell, the shell wall is at its thinnest here. From there, the diameter gradually increases to form the expansion section at the airflow outlet. A rigid ring is installed at the top of the tower, and below the throat, the diameter expands in a hyperbolic shape. The shell wall in the lower section also becomes thicker, thereby forming a lower ring beam with a certain degree of stiffness. The ventilation shafts can also be designed as frustum-cone shells or composite cone shells, or as polygonal tower shafts with a steel framework covered by wooden or asbestos-cement cladding. The nuclear power plant in Schmehausen, Germany, uses a tower shell with a cable-net structure in one of its 146-meter-high dry cooling towers; this shell is covered with aluminum cladding, which provides good seismic and wind resistance.