| Summary: | Crosswind degrades the cooling performance of a natural draft dry cooling tower (NDDCT) by affecting the air flow field at the inlet of the heat exchanger bundle, incurring complex vortexes inside the tower shell, and shifting the flow direction at the outlet of the tower. The pressure distribution change outside the radiators is found to be the main factor to affect the NDDCT’s overall cooling performance. An enclosure outside the heat exchanger bundle with an opening at the windward side is proposed to collect the crosswind and increase the pressure level outside the side and back radiator sections, so as to enhance the cooling performance of a NDDCT. As many researchers frequently recommend windbreaks for the same purpose, we combine an enclosure and windbreaks together, and adopted a computational fluid dynamics method to study the cooling performance of a NDDCT at the presence of an enclosure, windbreaks and a combination of the two structures at a wide range of crosswind velocity. Numerical results shows that methods of an enclosure and windbreaks could achieve a similar performance at a crosswind speed less than 16 m/s, and the combination of the two could remain a better performance under all investigated crosswind.
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