Restoration, Testing and Repair of 30-Year Old Cooling Towers at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Phase 2

摘要

Early in 1980, a comprehensive reliability study was made to ascertain the ability of the present 30 plus year old recirculating water system to meet the anticipated load demand through the year 2000. The anticipated load demand would require that 99% of the recirculating water equipment and cooling towers be in service at all times. This project was designed to determine if the present cooling tower system could be upgraded to handle the load demand or would additional cooling towers have to be constructed. One of the recommendations of this study was to replace the original redwood mortise lock fill with PVC fill in four fan cells of a 14 fan cell cross-flow tower for test purpose. This paper deals with this prototype installation and testing procedure. After project completion, a CTI Performance Test confirmed the four cells were performing at 100.3 percent of design.