ACHE - Air Cooler

A dry cooling air condenser is a device used to dissipate the heat generated by industrial processes using air as a cooling agent, without the use of water. Its main role is to cool water vapour to achieve a change of state, with the water passing from the gaseous phase to the liquid phase using the ambient air to eliminate the heat.

The advantages of dry cooling over wet cooling include reduced or zero water consumption, greater flexibility in areas where water is scarce, less dependence on weather conditions and reduced risk of water contamination. However, dry cooling air-cooled condensers generally have a slightly lower thermal efficiency and may require higher initial investment.

ACC condensers are an environmentally friendly alternative to air-cooled cooling towers for the closed-loop recycling of steam in thermal power generation processes. Whereas an air-cooled cooling tower rejects almost 40% of water vapour into the atmosphere, dry condensers condense 100% of the vapour and transform it into liquid water, thereby preserving the scarce resource that is water.

While the technology is always the same, based on the use of finned tubes to cool the steam circulating in the tubes, there are several different condenser geometries, depending on the constraints of the installation, the floor space available, or the thermal power to be dissipated.