Effects of Wind on Hot Air Recirculation (HAR) Behavior

Abstract

The air-cooled condenser system is impacted greatly by many factors such as the wind speed, the direction of wind and arrangement of site equipments. This paper concentrates on the hot air recirculation phenomenon and its dependence on ambient winds are numerically simulated by using the computational fluid dynamics code, FLUENT. In this paper, two different wind directions (case A and case B) and wind speeds are considered: Results show that the hot air recirculation increases with the increment of velocity speed. Case A has a critical wind direction angle. Wind causes an air temperature increase at the fan inlet due to hot air recirculation, resulting in the deterioration of the heat transfer performance. The hot air recirculation is the main factor responsible for the reduction of heat rejection rate. In case A, fan inlet temperature is higher than case B. The peak value of the HAR occurs at 9 m/s in case A.