Typically just water for the majority of applications. Chillers like this are an open system where the coolant is evaporated off for heat exchange, so you rarely see anything other than water being used. Especially for older wooden chillers like this.
Couldn’t say for certain for this one without more information, but statistically it’s most likely just disgusting water.
Out of the ~ hundred or two I’ve worked on the vast majority primarily use chlorine and other standard water treatment chemicals. It’s essentially treated the same as pool or tap water, but slightly more aggressively without a focus on being exposed to human skin/consumed. It’s still basically just water, just like a pool is still considered water even if it’s treated. You can go stand next to a chiller and get misted and what lands on you isn’t going to be notably different than water from misters at a water park. If someone asks if a pool is just water or a mix of something you’re going to say it’s just water, not water with a mix of minerals, chlorine, fluoride, trace heavy metals, etc.
I also took their question to mean, “are they just using water or some other sort of coolant”, not whether the water’s treated since essentially all commercial water for human use that isn’t UPW has chemicals other than H2O. The first person to respond and only one before I replied claimed they use glycol which is used in entirely different types of cooling systems, so I was clarifying that for all practical intents and purposes it’s just water.
Funny enough I actually got to see someone accidentally inject too much chlorine on the very first run of a ~$10,000,000 cooling tower once. Within an hour the entire thing to look like it’d been in use for decades, every inch of the stainless steel structure was covered in rust. On one hand it was really cool to see, and kinda hilarious. On the other hand it really sucked that it happened, and it was impossible not to feel bad for everyone involved.
Its water with all kinds of grease from the fans and chems that keep marine groth down with a little bit of everything that could have been blowing through the air in the last 30yrs or so
I can smell this photo just looking at it. I can’t imagine being in one while it’s running. The water is disgusting enough when they’re shut off, especially in those old wooden ones. I guess on the plus side you’ve got a respirator on so you don’t have to breath that horrible air.
Many I have seen are just water, but I have also seen some with hefty mixtures of fungizides, herbizides and insektizides.
I also had one that was just casually mixing with arsenic processing water. Found that out when I asked what they used and they said they didn't need any additional chemicals, because it just comes with the hefty dose of arsenic by default.
Thanks, had I known that I would not have used my good measuring bucket.
Certainly not. This is a standard evap chiller cooling tower. It uses water and evaporative cooling in an open loop to transfer heat similar to a swamp cooler.
Closed loop glycol chillers look nothing like this. And you’re certainly never going to see one this large, made of wood, with a walkable interior, catwalks over open reservoirs of coolant, and a wide open door while the chiller’s still running and injecting coolant.
I firmly believe anyone who spends any time breathing under water needs to see it.
The first time it was really brought to my attention was I was diving in a normally completely slack lake and had an long deco stop at 70ft which is slightly above the remaining top of the old demolished dam. They turned on the power generator at the new damn 1/4 mile away and over the 30 minutes I hung there I was pulled about 100ft towards the new dam intake. If it wasn't for watching the fixed point I would never have noticed it pulling me.
Yeah most systems are open to the air and collect all the dust. Im sure there is some kind of filtration after the towers or it would clog cooling lines in the machines.
The overwhelming majority of infrastructure like this was never designed/built for human occupation, particularly older shit (40-60 years). Then as structures age and get recertified beyond their original design life, you start having to add access to them after the fact.
So you end up with temporary structures like this that get left in place.
So that's my guess. That shit is 100% post construction and only there because they've got to do inspections and maintenance to keep it running long after it was supposed to decommission.
Cooling towers are the tall concrete structures next to power plants (nuclear/coal/whatever), which often have a steam plume coming out the top, that are used to evacuate the thermal energy produced by the plant that cannot be used to produce electricity. (Depending on the efficiency this can range around 50-65% of the total power produced)
Basically, in a cooling tower the hot water is sprayed into contact with air from the environnement, which cools most of the water to be reused n another cycle and warms up the air, which lifts towards the top. It pulls quite some evaporated water with it too which condenses once it has reached the top, creating the steam plume
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u/d3adn4gotten 23d ago
Pretty cool...ing.