Design of Evaporative Condenser with Arrangement for Easy Manual Descaling (PDF)

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Engineering - Mechanical Engineering, grade: 1, Savitribai Phule Pune University, formerly University of Pune, course: Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, language: English, abstract: Evaporative cooling takes advantage of the potential of the outside air in dry climates to absorb moisture, which results in a temperature reduction of the air stream. But one of the major drawbacks is the continuous scale built up on condenser tubes which makes a barrier between tubes and water sprayed on them, which in turn drastically reduces the heat transfer. This results in a loss of plant efficiency and increases annual refrigeration costs as the compressor work increases for compensating the pressure drop due to scaling.

In HVAC around 27% of worldwide energy is consumed only for different HVAC applications. This project mainly focuses on this problem statement, if the scale is 0.06mm then condenser performance decreases by 16%. A mainly evaporative condenser is used in different HVAC applications.

In order to overcome this problem, regular maintenance of the condenser should be done by descaling the coils. Various descaling methods are being used in industries descaling like mechanical descaling, chemical descaling, etc. But manual descaling is preferred over other methods due to its simplicity, less cost, and reliability. Yet there are some problems in manual descaling like the number of rows of condensing tubes is very large in numbers and also the pitch between them is less so it becomes very difficult to reach the deep portion of the evaporative condenser in order to clean them thoroughly and effectively scale removal.