Cooling Towers and their Maintenance Challenges

Cooling towers are part of a system that makes use of evaporation and heat transfer processes to cool a fluid, usually water.

Read more about these assets: Cooling Towers: Condition Monitoring (dynamox.net)

Main challenges for cooling tower maintenance

Among the main challenges in monitoring the condition of cooling towers are:

• High operating temperatures, which can contribute to shorter operating cycles, premature failure and unscheduled downtime;
• Excessive levels of sound and vibration, which can result in safety problems for employees, fatigue and premature failure;
• Extreme temperature and humidity conditions inside the cooling tower, which can therefore rapidly degrade mechanical systems, affecting noise levels and bearing life;
• Premature bearing failure and excessive pinion shaft wear;
• Inadequate lubrication;
• Unbalanced fans;
• Corrosion and erosion.

MAINTAINING COOLING TOWERS SAFELY

Bearing in mind the challenges listed, how do you identify faults before a breakdown in an environment that is difficult to access, if not inaccessible, with high noise, vibration and temperature?

Continuous and remote monitoring by wireless sensor devices is a perfectly applicable technology.

It helps the industry to make intervention decisions before an increase in temperature and vibration results in a breakdown, incident or accident with high costs or more serious consequences.

When a gearbox needs maintenance or repair, it is necessary to hire a crane to remove it and send it to a specialized service provider, usually already hired by the industry.

Hiring a crane, in addition to the cost of removing and reinstalling the gearbox, also brings risks to the operation. Depending on the situation, maintaining or recovering a gearbox with problems requires around two weeks of work.

So why not use a market solution that brings a new approach to cooling tower maintenance?

For example, by monitoring the gearbox continuously and remotely, the industry will be able to make assertive decisions about preventing failures. It will be possible to identify unbalances in fans, among other problems. This reduces risks and costs, increasing the reliability and continuity of production processes.

Learn about the Dynamox Solution: a device with acceleration and temperature sensors, combined with an Android/Apple App and/or Gateway for data collection and synchronization, as well as the Web Platform, where monitored data is centralized for analysis and diagnosis.

Text co-authored by Rodrigo Aquino – Mult Engrenagens