ACTIVE: Active Cooling Thermally Induced Vapor-Polymerization Effect
Challenge
Effective Dry-Cooling for Powerplants, Even During Hot Weather
About 41 percent of the United States’ fresh water resources is withdrawn for cooling power systems, roughly the same amount used to irrigate crops. Most is lost to evaporation, and the rest is returned to its source. However, handling and managing water is expensive. In response to those concerns, power plant operators are increasingly encouraged to reduce or eliminate cooling water. With such a draw on fresh water resources, there is a thrust to improve the efficiency of dry cooling to achieve performance competitive with wet cooling. One reason dry cooling systems are less efficient than their wet-cooling counterpart is due to the performance limitation imposed by ambient temperature.
Solution
ARA’s Active Cooling Thermally Induced Vapor-polymerization Effect technology, or ACTIVE, tackles that challenge. ACTIVE is highly flexible cooling system that is efficient during hot ambient conditions, with zero water consumption or loss.
When integrated into power plants, ACTIVE will:
- Render thermoelectric power plants independent from the nation’s water supply sources
- Improve energy efficiency
- Conserve water resources for other important uses
- Avoid the loss of turbine output
ACTIVE is a novel chemical heatpump cycle that provides supplemental or dedicated cooling with no water loss. ACTIVE cools below the ambient dry bulb temperature, precluding the loss of turbine output in hot weather. It operates in stand-alone or synchronized configurations. ACTIVE is a scalable technology to serve multiple on-site applications including closed cooling loops, gas turbine inlet air cooling, lube oil cooling, and other cooling applications.
