Water filtration is an essential function of any cooling tower operation that provides crucial protection. Without effective water filtration, cooling solutions would be unable to remove harmful contaminants that cause corrosion, fouling, and scale.
Because cooling towers are air scrubbers that suck in anything in the vicinity—including construction materials, leaves, environmental debris and litter—it’s important to have a robust filtration system capable of removing larger contaminants. Often, cooling towers also contain areas where stagnant water collects, creating an environment for bacteria to grow and biofilms to form, which results in troublesome fouling issues. Waterborne pathogens, especially Legionella, are a major risk due to their ability to multiply rapidly.
Due to these risk areas, cooling towers face increased maintenance costs, stringent environmental regulations related to deploying adequate water programs, Legionella testing, and bookkeeping, and increased downtime resulting from corrosion, fouling, and scale.
Advanced water filtration is the most effective solution to reduce particulate contamination.
Cooling Tower Water Treatment Process
Impact of Advanced Water Filtration
Cooling towers provide the perfect environment for bacteria to grow. While many programs utilize biocides in addition to scale and corrosion inhibitors to help reduce and control biofilm, a key piece of the puzzle is still missing. Advanced water filtration provides that missing layer of protection to minimize corrosion, fouling, and scale.
A water quality analysis may be performed to learn the size of particles present in the water, this will then provide direction as to where filtration is needed to ease operation and enhance performance downstream.
Problem areas vary but are typically related to dirty makeup and side stream water, along with basin sediment build up. Failure to resolve these problems results in contaminated water reaching the cooling tower and heat exchanger. Closed loop systems can also benefit from filtration as these typically have high oxygen rates which increase corrosion.
Regardless of where in the system you decide to leverage water treatment, advanced water filtration enables efficient operation and extends the lifecycle of cooling tower equipment. Ultimately, improved operational efficiency leads to tangible energy, water, and money savings.