Thermal Power Plant requires enormous quantity of water for cooling the steam in the condenser.

Availability of this large amount of condenser cooling water known as Circulating Water is a key factor in deciding the investment and location of a Thermal Power Plant. Thermal power plants utilize water as the medium of converting heat energy from coal or other fuels to mechanical rotational energy in the turbine to produce electricity. Water on heating in a boiler forms steam at high pressure and temperature. The steam then expands in a turbine to rotate it. After the steam leaves the turbine, it is then condensed and reused again. The condensation takes place in the condenser. The process removes the Latent heat and changes water in the vapour form to liquid form. This requires a medium to cool the steam. Water is the cooling medium in the condenser. This cooling water is termed Circulating Water or Condenser cooling water. As the steam condenses to water, the volume reduces drastically, to one by ten thousandth of the steam volume. This creates a vacuum in the condenser. The water then collects in the bottom part of the condenser called the hot well. The vacuum enables the steam to expand more to get higher work output from the turbine. The continuous condensing and removal of the water helps maintain the vacuum. Power plants operate with condenser vacuum in the range of 0.1 to 0.15 bar absolute. This is the maximum vacuum practically possible. The heat rejected in the condenser is almost 25 % of the heat input to a power plant. This constitutes the biggest loss in a thermal power plant.

How much Circulating Water? The quantity of Circulating Water required is very high. Based on a simple heat balance, the requirement will be almost 65 to 70 times the steam flow entering the Turbine. A 600 MW thermal power plant uses around 1800 tons per hour of steam from the boiler. This means the circulating water requirement in tropical areas will be almost 120,000 cubic metre per hour. With a 15 Meter head, this requires a pumping power of around 4 MW. This huge quantity of water, the second biggest input in a power plant after fuel, decides the location of a thermal power plant, including nuclear power plants.

Water for make up in the steam cycle is about 5% of the STeam Flow. For 200 Mw this is about 200 MW x 3 T/hr/Mw x 5% = 30 t/hr. 2. Water for Circulating or condenser cooling if from open sources river or sea is aprox 80 times . 200 MW x 3 T/hr/MW x 80 = 48000 T/hr. If this is a cooling tower system the requirement will be 3 % of this . 48000* 3% = 1440 T/hr 3. Coal qty yard storage depends on how many days you want to store. If it is 15 days storage 200 Mw x 0.5 T/hr/MW x( 24*15)= 36000 T. With bulk density of 0.9 T/M^3 = 36000/.9 = 40000 m^3. For storage consider a trapezoidal cross section of 30 deg slope assume length and breadth and caculate the dimensions of the storage.

Cooling towers are heat removal devices used to transfer process waste heat to the atmosphere. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove process heat and cool the working fluid to near the wet-bulb air temperature or, in the case of closed circuit dry cooling towers, rely solely on air to cool the working fluid to near the dry-bulb air temperature. Common applications include cooling the circulating water used in oil refineries, petrochemical and other chemical plants, thermal power stations and HVAC systems for cooling buildings. The main types of cooling towers are natural draft and induced draft cooling towers. The classification is based on the type of air induction into the tower. Cooling towers vary in size from small roof-top units to very large hyperboloid structures (as in the adjacent image) that can be up to 200 metres (660 ft) tall and 100 metres (330 ft) in diameter, or rectangular structures (as in Image 3) that can be over 40 metres (130 ft) tall and 80 metres (260 ft) long. The hyperboloid cooling towers are often associated with nuclear power plants, although they are also used to some extent in some large chemical and other industrial plants. Although these large towers are very prominent, the vast majority of cooling towers are much smaller, including many units installed on or near buildings to discharge heat from air conditioning.