A cooling tower is a heat rejection device, which extracts waste heat to the atmosphere though the cooling of a water stream to a lower temperature. The type of heat rejection in a cooling tower is termed “evaporative” in that it allows a small portion of the water being cooled to evaporate into a moving air stream to provide significant cooling to the rest of that water stream. The heat from the water stream transferred to the air stream raises the air’s temperature and its relative humidity, and this air is discharged to the atmosphere. Evaporative heat rejection devices such as cooling towers are commonly used to provide significantly lower water temperatures than achievable with “air cooled”.
