This cooling tower extension for Aspentech HYSYS is able to predict the cooling water tower performance given the design conditions and the new operating conditions. Given the flow, inlet temperature to the tower and wet bulb, the HYSYS extension will predict the cooling tower outlet temperature.
The Problem
Cooling water tower is a common unit operation in petrochemical, oil and gas, chemical and power industry. Aspen HYSYS is widely used for those industries and it satisfies majority of the needs. For those industries, cooling towers are considered the tail of a dog. However, when it comes to geothermal binary power plant industry, the cooling tower becomes extremely important and it is almost the head of a dog. One common requirement is to predict the binary power plant performance along the wet bulb temperature of the year. One way you do it is to iterate with the cooling tower vendors for a million times and yet a satisfactory answer is not reached.
The Solution
Since majorities of the calculation is done in HYSYS, the best way to calculate the cooling tower performance is to directly calculate it right in HYSYS. The cooling tower unit operation interface is written in Aspen HYSYS Extension View Editor. All the other calculation code is written in Visual Basic.Net.
