Cooling Towers, Fills and accessories

Types of fills in cooling tower

The performance of a cooling tower is determined by many factors among which, cooling tower fill is of great importance. The fills types and quality decide whether a cooling tower is able to transfer heat efficiently or not. By choosing the right type of cooling tower fill, water will flow in much more surface area and the hot water will be cooled quickly.

There are two common types of fill media, splash fill and film fill.

 *Splash Fill:Splash fill consists of layers of horizontal bars or slats. When the warm water hits the surface of these bars, it spreads, breaks, and forms small droplets. As more droplets are formed, the contact between air and water flow is increased, which as a result accelerates the rate of cooling and evaporation.

Splash fill media were traditionally made from wood, but modern cooling tower fill material is made from PVC. PVC is more efficient as it facilitates better heat transfer. A big advantage of splash fill is that it’s very forgiving of insufficient

initial water distribution, since the splashing activity redistributes the water at each level of splash bars. Because of this, a cooling tower with splash fill effectively handles water containing debris. Maintenance is also easier, because its open nature offers easy visual inspection of the water flow pattern and the condition of the fill.

 *Film fill:film fill provides sheets of material that are shaped into a corrugated pattern for the water to travel across. It can be combined and stacked into blocks, to create various thicknesses and heights to fit individual cooling towers. Despite the advantage of splash fill in water distribution, film fill is by far the more popular type of fill, mainly due to its ability to expose greater water surface within a given packed volume.