How ThermaCross Boosts Performance

In today’s cooling tower market, tower owners and operators are trying to get the most capacity out of their existing assets. There are many 19mm cross-fluted fills available in the market, and there are wide variations in those product designs that impact their cooling performance. For decades, Brentwood’s CF1900 has provided good efficiency with the combination of accurate honeycomb edges, 30° corrugations, and subtle rounded microstructure. Some competing fills have a sharply defined, aggressive microstructure that improves the heat transfer characteristic of the fill but adds detrimental pressure drop and reduces the amount of air available to affect the cooling. That type of design can end up providing less overall cooling. On the other end of the spectrum, there are fill options that have almost no microstructure, yielding a resultant lower total efficiency.

To improve upon these fill options, Brentwood sought to develop a new family of counterflow fill products that would substantially increase thermal performance. As a result, Brentwood developed ThermaCross™19. With its patent-pending MicroBoost™ design, ThermaCross is able to achieve an improved heat transfer characteristic without the penalty of reduced airflow. This combination is the “Boost” in MicroBoost. The result is a fill that can be directly replaced without affecting existing fans and motors, while providing improved cooling (up to 15% increased thermal capability) for field-erected towers built around CF1900.

With a tower design of 6ft (1.8m) of CF1900 and typical design conditions, ThermaCross can provide colder water not only at 6ft (1.8m) fill depth, but also even at a 5ft (1.5m) fill depth. For towers designed around 4ft of CF1200, and some designed with only 3 ft of fill height, the boost in heat transfer and the additional airflow also help ThermaCross match, and even outpace, CF1200.

The place where ThermaCross really shines is lower water loading conditions. Its MicroBoost design provides the push to utilize as much of the fill’s surface area as possible based on the available water to be filmed out across it. Because of this, ThermaCross’ heat transfer characteristic at lower water loadings is markedly higher than competitive fills. The results can be dramatic and can open new doors as you design competitive towers for your customers.

Check out these performance graphs, comparing ThermaCross 19 to other standard 19mm cross-fluted products: