The role of the smoking tower in a nuclear power plant is actually easy to understand. The reason is that if you build a nuclear power plant inland, you need to build a cooling tower, which is the hyperboloid structure you usually see in the image above. It emits white smoke and looks very polluted, but in fact the white smoke is. all water vapor, which is no different from cooking steam at home.
Is this the most efficient form today?
The role of cooling towers is not difficult to understand. Thermal power plants and nuclear power plants heat water to obtain steam at high pressure. , which then impacts the steam turbine to produce electricity. However, after the high temperature and high pressure steam impacts the turbine, we should not release the steam into the air and go away in vain. Consequentlyuent, the high temperature steam must be cooled and transformed back into water to continue the cycle. In his book "Seawater Cooling Tower", Professor Zhao Shunan presents a set of data as follows: in traditional thermal power plants, only about 40% of the energy burned by fuel is converted into electrical energy, while 48% is evacuated with the cooling water. , and 12% Carried away by smoke. In a nuclear power plant, only about 33% of the nuclear energy is converted into electrical energy, and the remaining 67% becomes waste heat and is carried away by the cooling water. ?
So the best way is to use sea water at the beach. ?
But the problem is that our nuclear power plants or thermal power plants are not located by the sea. ?
It's a good way to increase the contact zone between hot water and air. For example, pumping these 10million tons of hot water in a large horizontal pipe placed high and drill dense holes. at the bottom of the pipe there are honeycomb shaped holes, then the hot water flows through these holes. During the flow process, the contact area between hot water and air is increased and the cooling speed is faster. ?
This is a good solution. But is it perfect? There appears to be room for improvement. ?
We can put a big pipe containing hot water inside the hole in a right horizontal hole, and at the top, then put a big fan at the left inlet of the hole to blow continuously pump air into the cave and place a large fan at the right exit of the cave to pump the air. In this case, when the hot water in the cave pipe falls, it will be like a warm rain shower. strong airflow will blow from left to right, the cooling rate is faster. ?
TheNatural draft cooling towers are mainly used in the electrical industry. Since the cooling water flow rate in the power industry is large, the cooling tower must have strong processing capacity and low operating costs. This is the advantage of naturally ventilated cooling towers. Typically, they can process several thousand tons of water per hour, and even taller ones can process more than 100,000 tons per hour. ?
For this reason, naturally ventilated cooling towers are generally very large. Currently, the world's largest cooling tower is 210 meters high. ?