This customer, a district cooling plant, had undergone a major overhaul of their cooling towers that had been in service for 10+ years and they needed a flow specialist to help them optimize their condenser water flow out of 4 separate chiller skids.

The objective was to accurately measure water flow at each of the 4 condenser lines feeding the cooling towers without system shutdown or any pipe cutting/drilling. And to optimize condenser pump flow to ensure that each cooling tower is operating at design conditions to produce maxi-mum cooling efficiency.

The condenser water lines did not have any flowmeters installed therefore the customer did not exactly know how much water was being pumped to the cooling towers.

They needed to measure flowrate on each of the four condenser lines to understand the hydraulic behavior of the condensers and their cooling towers to be able to optimize to maximum efficiency possible. Moreover, the customer did not desire any pipe cutting, system alterations, system shutdown, or any pipe intrusion as that would compromise the structural integrity of the whole chilled water system. We proposed using our clamp-on ultrasonic flow meter to measure water flowrates on each of the 24” pipes from outside the pipe without any pipe cutting or intrusion.

Our clamp-on flowmeters offer an accuracy of 0.5% RD (may vary depending on the site conditions) and it is exactly what the customer needed to conduct hydraulic balancing of their cooling towers.