Investigation of air-cooled condenser’s operating parameters in modern thermal power plant

Abstract

Air-cooled condensers in thermal power plants have recently become increasingly popular. Besides all the advantages they have, like no demands for water supply on the plant site and no need for taking care of environmental regulations, they also have some serious disadvantages. One of the biggest disadvantages air-cooled condensers do have is precisely the nature of the Earth?s atmosphere being their low temperature reservoir. Low density and low heat capacity of the air as the cooling medium combined with extremely stochastic behavior of the atmosphere itself put some serious challenges in front of the air-cooled condenser?s proper and steady functioning. In this paper, the operating parameters of the air-cooled condenser in the chosen thermal power plant were investigated to gain a clearer insight into the influence of the atmospheric changes on its entropy generation and consequently on its efficiency. Also, the acquired results were further proposed as a starting point for potential optimization of the process inside the device.