Why Are Cooling Towers Shaped Like That?

[@PracticalEngineeringChannel]

⚡Making a holiday gift list? Check out the store at store.practical.engineering 🌌Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: go.nebula.tv/Practical-Engineering

[@associatedblacksheepandmisfits]

Was Grady on the building an easter egg ?😊

[@marblemunkey]

Question, assuming that I am already subscribed to Nebula (I am), as a creator does it help you more to watch you videos on TY or nebula?

[@Vindortek]

I just saw you in Bloomington IL! Love the videos man and thanks for making the event free to the public!

[@michaelmayhem350]

Watched your video on nebula but came here to say when you said "I'm going to build one in my garage" I was all excited to get to see you build a miniature thermonuclear reactor in your garage and immediately had flash backs of the story of David Hahn. But your video didn't play out like that at all 😂🤣😂🤣

[@Lewis-kf2pj]

People say turbIne because there’s an I there, you bristol.

[@alicee2140]

Grady: "I'm going to build one in my garage!" Grady's wife: "Just the cooling tower, right?" Grady: 🙂

[@Hybris51129]

Later on... Grady: "Oh no. They found me. I don't know how, but they found me." Grady's wife: "Who are you talking about?" Grady: "The Libyans! They got me the Uranium for the reactor!" Grady's wife: "You told me you were just building a "cooling tower"!"

[@Rick1984FL]

Wait a minute Grady Are you telling me you built a power station… IN OUR GARAGE?

[@dieselhead24]

@@Hybris51129 Plutonium not uranium! C'mon Marty!

[@Hybris51129]

@@dieselhead24 I don't think Grady would be building a bomb though. The man does have some limits.

[@anotheruser9876]

David Hahn flashbacks.

[@mqb3gofjzkko7nzx38]

Now I want to see a cooling tower cooled gaming pc.

[@Corang98]

I think the channel called major hardware did this awhile back

[@Shredxcam22]

data centers. Where i work we use a cooling tower to chill water for a water chilled A/C which cools a computer room. Thus cooling tower cooled computers

[@Hybris51129]

I think over a decade ago LTT did a video on doing just that. Even before then I know in the early 2000's some guys were playing around with this system. Generally speaking it did work but it made the room very humid and eventually would stop working without another system in place to take out all the humidity and cool the room back down.

[@beehard44]

For a while, bong coolers were a thing lol. They're not shaped like nuclear plant towers, but they cool down water cooled PCs with a tall evaporative tower that showers water down and blows air up

[@fahim_19]

Good idea 😂

[@peterzweck1763]

I am but a humble farmer...but I use a psychrometric chart to judge when to turn on the fans on my grain silo to dry grain. Here in Southern Australia we have hot dry summers (which is when we harvest) and rarely need to dry grain...but when we do have a wet summer I have a silo (bin) with a high capacity fan that just uses ambient air (no added heat), so a psychrometric chart and a wet bulb thermometer helps guide the process.

[@Andrew_Gregg]

As an operations supervisor at a thermal power plant this is awesome and will be referenced when training new employees and refreshing the senior operations employees. Thank you!

[@trump1105]

Yes, I wish they showed this video when I went into my initial training.

[@Andrew_Gregg]

@ the most common question I get is why the cooling tower is shaped that way. I can get through it but no where near this fluidly

[@realracing3specter295]

@@Andrew_Greggi always thought they had some fans inside the tower to force air flow from bottom to the top, but i had no idea it was all a natural fluid flow with NO moving parts. the hyperboloid shape, which i thought to be very fragile, turned out to be stronger... and thats how its so thin and structurally stable. they could still create a natural draft out of a simple cylindrical tower but ofcourse the primary concern would was the structural integrity, solved by such simple yet genius shapes.

[@frollard]

Kinda blows my mind that a power plant would hire someone without 4+ years of formalized education on these topics/charts. XD. Not to discount how amazing Grady's vids are...just the bar is at a different level than I suspected.

[@vink6163]

@@frollard Unfortunately there isn't an unlimited supply of perfectly qualified people just waiting to apply for the jobs you have. Usually taking an inexperienced but capable person and training them up yourself is a much better option than having nobody at all, which usually results in other employees burning out, leaving, and making the problem even worse.

[@veryboringname.]

I was already impressed by the models you build in your garage, but that hospital you built at 12:08 just to show us how cooling towers are used in HVAC really takes the cake!

[@michaelbrinks8089]

I bet he can explain how a fan blade moves air. Sound so complicated, that you can't understand it. Even though you already know how a fan blade moves air.

[@ZonamaPrime]

It wasn't just the model hospital, but the whole diorama was breathtaking. Did you see the mini-highway off in the distance, it looked so good.

[@WilhelmvonFahrvergnugen]

Grady, saw what you did there...

[@frostilver]

Holy! It has "Grady" written on the top!

[@bryan9931]

Its Not Cake.

[@FranJames333]

Having worked on these towers on several uk power plants on the packing and efficiency of the cooling towers, one thing that you could add to your video is why the condensers are used and it’s not just to cool the steam back to water as that is counter intuitive, the real reason for doing this is to do with the properties of steam and water, 1L of water expands to 1000L of steam, the turbines have 3 sections, high pressure, medium and low pressure then to the condenser. The cooling of the condenser causes the steam to turn back to water, contracting by 1000 times, creating a negative pressure causing the turbine to spin faster generating more power and the reduced pressure means the steam remains steam at 50 degrees C. The cooling allows an increase of up to 50MW from each 500MW generating unit. The efficiency of the pack and cooling of the tower water greatly affects this gain ie if a cooling tower has lost efficiency amounting to loss of 5 degrees of cooling costs based coal fired units was £100k per degree, per tower, so on a plant like Eggborough with 8 towers around £4mill per year. The more the cooling of the condensers the greater the vacuum therefore the more power generated from the same ton of coal

[@AbdulRahman-ju6wk]

Oh wow, that's incredibly interesting. I'm starting out as a performance testing engineer, great to have this golden insight from you!

[@jle2500]

"It's basically a cloud machine" I jokingly told my son when he was two the small power plant we drive past was Cloud Factory. He's 6 now he knows its a power plant but he still calls it the cloud factory.

[@Mk-ms3oq]

Well ain't that sweet.

[@vink6163]

A good example of the old adage "sometimes a little inaccuracy saves tons of explanation."

[@goosenotmaverick1156]

​@@vink6163my kids are 6 and 7, and the truth in that statement 😂😂😂😂

[@28ebdh3udnav]

Lol my brother told a former coworker of his asked him, "What's the big fans that Texas built a lot of" and his response was, "When it gets too hot, they turn those on to cool us down"

[@rainarden3905]

Nuclear power plant computer case

[@anadverb5063]

There are lots of knowledgeable engineers out there, but very few of them are also great teachers. That’s a rare combination of talents and it’s so appreciated.

[@davemccage7918]

It’s a parabola! Just that, nothing else…. …nothing else.

[@grahambarton1942]

I’ve never been impressed by ignorant journalists who often include shots of cooling towers whenever they are writing about pollution or environmental issues. It’s just water vapour- same as the clouds, not smoke from combustion.

[@phil20_20]

Ya mean nukyaler electricity doesn't burn? 🔥🤯😱

[@340wbymag]

If it was clean, they wouldn't be allowing millions of dollars' worth of water to just waft away. Recovery of condensate is easy and cheap when compared to the cost of fresh water.

[@funnynameman]

​​@@340wbymagbut they aren't letting the boiler water waft away, its a totally seperate cooling cycle with normal water rather than the treated boiler water, which gets cooled through normal heat exchangers

[@olgafatica3445]

I know what you mean, but water vapour is indeed a greenhouse gas. But it's got a very short permanence time in the atmosphere, depending on temperature. But you are still right, people misguidedly think is something from combustion, with "toxic stuff" , and journalists play on it. It's not cool. Pun intended.

[@roadie3124]

There's usually a bit of clever photography where the photos are taken so that the light of the sun makes dark shadows on the clouds of water vapour, making it look like dirty smoke. Dirty tricks from dirty activists fooling most of the people most of the time.

[@RealityCheck6969]

We used to bathe in the "river" coming from the cooling towers when I was a child. :))) It was hot water. It was especially nice on winters.

[@dianapennepacker6854]

Yeah so much fun touching butts with dorks. Miss those days.

[@PhilsJunkDrawer]

Lake Anna in Virginia was built specifically for this purpose. Well, cooling a nuclear plant, not bathing. But it’s crazy warm, and lovely to swim/boat in.

[@melissaharris3389]

Manatees in Florida love the warm water from power plant discharge.

[@synth1002]

Very strange, usually it was pipes. I used to bath in real river that gets splashed by cooling water from the powerplant, whirlpools all around

[@chrstfer2452]

They do this for the geothermal plant in iceland, its legitimately a tourist destination

[@fitshamer]

I love that you used a video of Grady Hospital. The reference to your self did not go unnoticed! A+.

[@felixmoore6781]

12:08

[@rkmetzr]

Long time watcher, first time subscriber, I did it cause the beard. I don’t know why that pushed me over the edge. But it did. As a dad, and a voracious learner myself, I use your videos for “Learning Night-Featuring Dad” where I pull out a white board and teach my girls about a topic they choose (read:gently coaxed towards…sometimes), and I draw and talk them through how something works. There are sooo many things in this world even I (not as some sort of genius, but as a 40 YO man of a specific inclination) do not know or understand. Even giving them a cursory explanation of something gives them a leg up on understanding, further in the future. Thank you for your work, and thank you for helping me raise my girls (my wife says thanks too, she knows about us).

[@morkk5945]

You're an amazing father!

[@renital_4279]

W dad. I'm sure your daughters love you.

[@rdallas81]

Keep up the good work. Proactive parenting is important, and a key feature in child, parent relationship- That is missing today in this social media, App, Game world we live in today. Nice to see such a comment which surely deserves a thumb up.

[@AlexWaardenburg]

7:00 I'm an HVAC professional and I love seeing the psychrometric chart in a KZbin video! I design dehumidification systems for suspension bridge cables.

[@AxDhan]

just use paper towels

[@HomersIlliad]

That sounds like a pretty cool job.

[@AlexWaardenburg]

@@AxDhan You joke, but that's effectively how desiccant dehumidifiers work. They soak up the humidity from the air, then you blast them with heat to dry them back out so that you can reuse them. Then you pack them in a wheel and rotate it through an airstream that you want to dry, and a separate airstream that dries them back out.

[@stupid1557]

I had no idea dehumidification of suspension cables was a thing.

[@AlexWaardenburg]

@@stupid1557 it wasn't until they figured out packing the cables with lead paste was a no-no. There's just no better way to keep cables from corroding. The cables are made up of a ton of tiny wires, and there ends up being a lot of space between the wires in the cable for rain water to collect. But, if you seal the cable best you can and push dry air into the cable you can dry out the cable and prevent it from rusting.

[@chaostrain1927]

One thing I love about Grady's video is that even if I already know about a subject, he seems to always find some information I don't know. Thank you, Grady, and I look forward to your next video.

[@bullithedjames937]

Listening listening to him narrated is my favorite.

[@jitendraasole5827]

Same goes with me

[@zeee40]

One of the most advanced version of it is the Heller-Forgó Indirect Dry Cooling System. The water flows in a closed system of water-to-air heat exchangers built in the tower and does not evaporate. So there are not big clouds coming out of the tower. It is useful if you had produced deionised water with ion exchange, and you want to reuse it. It was invented by two Hungarian engineers László Heller and László Forgó.

[@santumi2298]

won't the water absorb floating ions and therefore have to be deionized again?

[@drecksaukerl]

Basically 1/2 of an undergraduate course in thermodynamics covered in a 20 minute video. You are to be congratulated on your brevity, sir!

[@elliotfitzgerald8950]

And you are not

[@elliotfitzgerald8950]

But I agree with the sentiment here

[@pendlera2959]

@@elliotfitzgerald8950 That was rude and unnecessary.

[@r.yuksel9774]

Elliot's existence is rude and unnecessary​@@pendlera2959

[@moos5221]

7:51 I know that water vapor goes upwards, from observation when cooking and from knowledge that clouds form in the sky, but I always thought that temperature is the driving factor for humidity to rise. It blew my mind to see this chart and hear your explanation, I really didn't expect water in gas form to be lighter than the other air molecules, though I should have know it from the position of hydrogen in the periodic table. Thank you, I learned something extra from this video!

[@MikeHalsall]

Another place it come into play daily is for pilots, both small and large aircraft. Ends up being especially dangerous for small planes. Feels counterintuitive that humid air is less dense. Add hot summer temperatures and especially high humidity, and a plane sitting on the ground at an airport at a 3000' elevation may *feel* like it's at 6500' (called density altitude: pressure altitude corrected for temperature). A naturally aspirated plane with modest horsepower loaded up with people and bags will really struggle to both make engine power and for the wings to make lift.

[@NikolaiUA]

@@MikeHalsall So hot&high should be ammended with hot&humid&high

[@MikeHalsall]

@@NikolaiUA indeed - though the "pressure altitude" is the piece in the equation that also accounts for humidity. Essentially the weight of all the air molecules in the air column pressing down on me in my current spot... if it's more humid or less humid, the "weight" reading is still the weight and the humidity component of that is baked in. Temperature is not baked in, though (heh)... so pressure altitude (e.g. the difference between what 29.92 inHg at sea level of 0' and what the number actually needs to be set to to read 0' (or, say, the known airfield elevation)) plus correction for temperature is all that's needed. There are actually five different types of altitude... pressure altitude, density altitude, indicated altitude, true altitude, and absolute altitude. Which makes it a bit confusing especially to new student pilots. But it's really about frames of reference... both the instrument's frame of reference and the plane's frame of reference to some other thing (including an imaginary line in the air at 18,000 feet when (in the US) pilots all set their altimeters to 29.92 so they don't have to be fiddling with it in cruise and you can have planes passing by each other with 1000' vertical separation at Mach .89).

[@NikolaiUA]

@@MikeHalsall Got how the pressure alt accounts for humidity, but did not why it doesn't also do so for temperature, why isn't it baked in. If you have the same physical altitude, humidity, and all the other factors (save fot the temperature) fixed - doesn't changing (e.g. increasing) just the temperature alone make the air e.g. less dense and hence auto-increase the pressure alt reading? Yeah, there's a bit to learn initially about altitudes, flight levels and altimeters (e.g. capt. joe had an altimeter video recently), but it surprises me there are fresh student pilots nowadays who come with 0 knowledge to the school from what I understand. You'd imagine an aspiring pilot would be an aviation enthusiast in the first place and would've belted hundreds of flight hours in a sim like MSFS or the likes before going to a flight school; and know the theory part from there.

[@MikeHalsall]

​@@NikolaiUA yeah great question - you've got it as "just the temperature alone make the air e.g. less dense and hence auto-increase the pressure alt reading" Pressure altitude is based on a model that assumes a standard temperature profile in the atmosphere - that is, a standard temperature lapse rate, which is what everything is calibrated to. Using that pressure altitude is going to give me the correct altitude of where I'm at relative to sea level. i.e. on the ground, my altimeter reading will match the airport elevation. When we put temperature into the equation (that density altitude) - let's say it's a super hot 100 degree day - now my plane will "feel" like it's much higher; e.g. airfield elevation is 2000' but now with the temperature thrown in, my plane "feels" like it's at 5000' (those are pretty real-ish numbers). But if I were to use that in my altimeter, I'd be reading I'm 3000' higher than I actually am. If I actually used density altitude in my altimeter and I were in the clouds, I'd run into the ground 3000 feet before I should've. So I need that corrected-for-temp density altitude to tell me how my plane is going to perform, but I need pressure altitude reported by ground stations to tell me my altitude relative to the terrain around me. I hope that makes sense? I'm just a private pilot with 400 hours, not a CFI or meteorologist :)

[@JW-rv2lp]

Thanks!

[@V__7741]

8:47 "its not smoke its STEAM from from the STEAMED clams we're having, mmm steamed clams."

[@gazman1238]

At this time of year? At this time of day? In that part of the power plant? Located entirely within the cooling tower?

[@ButtaDawg6969]

i got fed misconceptions by captain underpants. in one comic went into a cooling tower and grew 1000x their size from the green radioactive liquid in the towers

[@YunxiaoChu]

@@ButtaDawg6969lol

[@stevej71393]

Superintendent, I hope you're ready for mouth-watering hamburgers!

[@SoulDelSol]

Steamed hams

[@ETG168]

9:14 Latent heat: Mentioned Technology: Connected

[@vinnysworkshop]

Brilliant.

[@somedudesstuff801]

He should have bought 2 of them.

[@1224chrisng]

Brought to you by Menards! The Midwestern favourite

[@manitoba-op4jx]

@@somedudesstuff801 built!

[@heathergreylive]

Hey. Have a great day. 💝

[@SilverIcetail]

A turban is a hat. A turbine is a turbine.

[@KiranKumarBokkesam]

Americans right?

[@thomasw178]

Unless you pronounce it like the hat. Which is perfectly acceptable and just as accurate.

[@kyarspeyk]

Hat or head gear,

[@chuckensmith]

Plot twist: A turban is a turbine.

[@deepakmohapatra5785]

Just say it turbine, why call it turban. for ages it was turbine.

[@rakeshmalik5385]

Cooling towers are also great for concerts... I got to film a concert where the producer brought a 9 foot concert grand out to an unfinished nuclear cooling tower for a solo piano concerto. It was pretty amazing, because he used the incredible reverb to make his own acccompiment.

[@NeonBeeCat]

Was it in Tennessee by chance, or an unfinished plant elsewhere

[@lizj5740]

In the early 1970s, I stood inside one of the cooling towers at the Rancho Seco Nuclear Plant, which was under construction near Sacramento, California. I don't remember an echo, but I was awed by the massive size (425 feet, or 130 m, tall). Cheers from Liz and Ginger (pic left) in Australia.

[@UcranianoUKR]

Rave in unfinished Ukrainian cooling tower in Crimea?

[@timotay22]

An additional benefit of hyperboloid shapes of cooling towers is mitigating vortex shedding. There is a specific combo of diameter of the tower and windspeed that resonates (like Tacoma Narrows Bridge). If the tower has variable diameter throughout its height, a bit of it is always resonating with any wind speed, but never the whole thing at once.

[@awake780]

Fantastic explanation.

[@justicesportsman6020]

As a thermodynamics and fluid dynamics enjoyer, I helped an architectural student with their capstone project where we were trying to pull water out of the air for an off the grid solution. It was humbling to say the least. Massive respect to the people who do the research to solve these problems.

[@crackasaurus_rox9740]

I had to design one of these once. As far as engineering hours go, it was the most expensive piece of equipment in the plant.

[@andrewn7365]

I wouldn't have guessed that. What sort of problems do you need to solve when designing one and what information do you need? What makes it so particularly time consuming? In my ignorance, it'd seem like a few equations would spit out an optimal solution given the volume of water to cool, maximun footprint, and maybe the climate at the location.

[@timchambers5242]

I would expect that once you have a cooling tower design, it can be replicated many times. Why reinvent the wheel every time?

[@Mallchad]

​​@@timchambers5242the tower has to be scaled to be greater than the exact thermal requirements of the system and the weather of the local area. Procurement off the same equipment may be an issue also. arrived requirements, foundation...

[@edspy1418]

I'm a firefighter and I just ran a medical call at my local coal fired power plant last shift. My partner and I were in shock at the scale of the place and had so many questions about, of all things, the cooling tower! Thank you so much for putting this amazing content together!

[@ttystikkrocks1042]

Au contraire! As a newly minted HVAC professional who just finished classes in psychometry, I'm thrilled to not only see the chart in use but to be able to follow along as you used it to explain how it is that more humid environments can actually aid cooling! This explains why those shapely cooling towers are a relative rarity in the dry Western part of the country, so thanks for the explanation!

[@joshuarosen6242]

That’s interesting. In the very damp UK, where I live, natural draught cooling towers like this used to be very common in coal-fired power stations. The last coal-fired power station closed a couple of months ago and most of the UK’s cooling towers have now been demolished. It’s a shame. I like them. It had never occurred to me that our damp climate made them especially effective.

[@ttystikkrocks1042]

@joshuarosen6242 absolutely fascinating stuff, isn't it? My intended specialty is climate control in indoor growing spaces. I've developed technology to more effectively manage temperature, humidity and heat loss to make these systems more reliable, more robust and reduce energy consumption by half or more. High humidity helping to shed heat is an extremely useful tidbit and explains why it's much easier to maintain temperature in a room full of plants than it is when it's empty.

[@andrewcarnegie5342]

How much did it cost to cover studies and what’s average yearly salary package in that industry

[@ttystikkrocks1042]

@andrewcarnegie5342 I paid ZERO for the 2 year Associates Degree, books, supplies and even a notebook computer. Colorado as well as many other states has a program to train tradesmen for certain high demand industries. In 5 years I could easily be pulling down 6 figures. If you like working with your hands, can handle basic electricity, very light plumbing, ductwork, brazing and soldering and study a few scientific principles and a few more types of parts, you can do it too.

[@mikefochtman7164]

Great discussion. I worked at several plants in the northeast, and one thing you didn't quite touch on is water consumption. Yes, we use towers so we can 'recycle' the feedwater. But a large nuc plant might have to dissipate 2000 MW of thermal energy. That can mean evaporating water in the tower at rates like 13000 gallons / minute. Yes, over half a million gallons per hour. So having a source for that makeup water to the cooling system is a key to success.

[@reinhardtreinsch2923]

Thanks for comfirming my suspicion. My personal estimate was about 2% lower. This year was election year in my state. And the blue party seriously wanted to go nuclear+lignite for our electricity needs. Those 6GW (net-)electricity essentially would have meant a water consumption of about 4 million people. Yes, I live in a quite rural state so each person just uses 100 l per day. To illustrate how crazy such an idea is: The state has about 3 million inhabitants. And we got a car factory in the last years. This car factory consumes water for about 40 000 people. The fuzz about this water usage even made international headlines. BTW a dry tower would generate quite a big wind. 🤣

[@ShaqsNewGroove]

@@reinhardtreinsch2923 It’s important to remember that every power production method has its downsides. Is water scarce is your state?

[@reinhardtreinsch2923]

@@ShaqsNewGroove We have a low ground water capacity. So if the rain is normal we can get along. But if you get two dry years in a row that´s a problem. And a 100km+ water pipeline for the car factory plus the prohibition to water your garden are likely to happen. So expanding your water consumption for power production is not smart 🤣.

[@ferkeap]

Still nuclear is the best choice and you can do it without large cooling towers, you can have a (new) lake as a cooling source or have a hybrid. And the plants don't need groundwater quality to supplement loops.

[@2Burgers_1Pizza]

In my region, this hot water is pumped through the city in winter for heating.

[@florahibernica]

Should happen everywhere, this is clever but still a terrible waste. I've seen distilleries using pipes to heat greenhouses, much smaller scale.

[@robertschnobert9090]

We should also replace cars with public transportation and walkable cities. Unfortunately that sounds like communism, so it's impossible. Being incredibly wasteful is better for the economy. Numbers have to go up hahaha 🌈 ​@@florahibernica

[@Alphacuremom55]

@@robertschnobert9090 Move to Europe then you clown

[@CATel_]

​@robertschnobert9090 How does not needing to look at the same terrain for 6 hours every time you want to visit your parents communism? In Europe a 3 hour dive can send you to a different country easily! Depending on your "luck" I'm sure it could lead you through at least 3, probably even 4 countries

[@eleycki]

@@robertschnobert9090not everyone lives in cities mate.

[@zachhoy]

Love the engineering talk! Also, you said it perfect here: "I just like the authenticity and thoughtfulness of videos that haven’t been through a writers room and ten levels of studio executives". This is a slight variation on what I tell all my friends and family these days, when I feel like I need to explain why I haven't been watching any recent movies or series.

[@kappagrapes]

"I know that's a little bit in the weeds" listen man, I will follow you into any patch of weeds you care to name. enthusiastic nerdy people telling me all about the stuff they love to study is the best thing on youtube.

[@TV-8-301]

Yes! The weeds are great because it's more context than what I could get from, say, reading the Wikipedia page on thermal cooling towers

[@carsonmeyer1677]

The weeds helped me understand the relation of even more of my chemical engineering topics in this video

[@matthewgough9533]

Nuclear worker here - this was tremendously insightful. I'll be at Comanche Peak next spring and it's cool to go in knowing all this.

[@thedallastexan]

Welcome to Texas!!

[@nax1807]

buckle up!

[@KidGibson]

During the Beijing Olympics in 2022, the cooling towers were a point of contention for Americans when watching. This video shows what they really were! The area around those towers have been cleaned up and made into a great park. It is also one of the few places you can actually go and walk inside the cooling towers! So amazing!

[@rdallas81]

😎 cool thanks!

[@rupertaitken3114]

I like the way you got Grady into it 12:09 - smart filming!!! 😎

[@KevinT3141]

I was going to say "12:08, I see what you did there" but you beat me to it.

[@shiftyhexahedron7891]

Well played sir. Well played.

[@empmachine]

Hands down my FAVOURITE THING about this channel is the models. They make it all sooooo real!

[@Jake-uc8mb]

That and the seemingly authentic enthusiasm

[@sparking023]

I really like how the iconic cooling towers of thermonuclear plants have so much aesthetic and history attached to it, and under that layer there's a ton of engineering and efficiency at play. Surely, the people designing those structures would not make something that big and specifically shaped to just look pretty (that's an architect thing lol)

[@domib2896]

I'm not a HVAC technician. I consider myself a sewage engineer. But I will still watch all your videos because I like to have a look at all the other topics connected to public infrastructure. In Germany we call it "to have a look over the rim of ones plate." It helps you to get a better overall picture if you don't limit yourself to your own specific topic but look at your surroundings.

[@joshyoung1440]

I do love German aphorisms.

[@joshyoung1440]

Also, if American culture could adopt such sensibilities, maybe we wouldn't have done the awful, terrible thing we just did last night. I did all I could to prevent it, but I'm a poor Californian; I didn't have much to donate and my vote for Kamala meant nothing...

[@rdallas81]

Who is Kamala? ​@@joshyoung1440

[@strangereyes9594]

Just to point it out, powerplants dont need to cool the water itself. They need to turn steam back into water, which needs a specific amount of energy like it did when it transitioned from water to vapor. Every joule more of cooling the water is energy lost you would have retained to turn it into electricity. The engineering is about to cool it exactly the right amount so it changes phases and not a joule more since no one wants to throw money out the chimney. Just in case it wasn't clear from the video.

[@tz8785]

You maybe don't have to, but you still very much want to. The lower you can get your condenser temperature, the lower the condenser pressure is and a lower condenser pressure increases efficiency.

[@gerrywalsh5766]

Just like in refrigeration... the saturation point. Anything more and you're dealing with subcooling or superheat.

[@MatthijsvanDuin]

he explained it just fine in the video

[@jollygiant]

A nice explanation of minimising sub-cooling 👍

[@domib2896]

I wouldn't mind them throwing money out of the chimney. I would travel to my nearest power plant just to watch that.

[@edwardhammock24]

One of the best videos that I've seen for a while. Thank you for all the effort that you have put in. Xxx

[@MichaelSteeves]

13:37 CANDU plant! All of the plants in Canada use lake or ocean cooling rather than cooling towers, but cool to see a reactor that is so familiar to me.

[@theotheroneb1548]

I used to work at opg and now I'm at Bruce!!! Neat to hear someone working in the same group also watching :)

[@kevinyancey958]

In-land power plants will create their own ponds to cool the power plant. It's best to do this, than to heat a lake with fish in it.

[@theotheroneb1548]

@kevinyancey958 not if you have the largest lakes in the world. You only need to raise local temperatures by a few degrees and the fishing is great near the outlet due to the slightly warmer water keeping the big fish around.

[@kevinyancey958]

You can see the same effect in your shower, if you have a curtain. If you take a hot shower and have a fine mist sprayer, you see the curtain get pulled into the shower. That's all because the air current created by the warm, most air rising and the cooler, drier air being pulled in to replace the air that rose. Even with hot water, you can create currents. Some old hot water heating systems didn't use a pump. Instead, the hot water would rise and draw the cooler water into the boiler, to be heated. It took longer to heat up the whole system this way, but worked nevertheless.

[@JohanHultin]

All plants here in Sweden are cooled by seawater, and obviously built on the coast. I always thought these were super foreign as a kid, and turns out that I was pretty much right. Besides stuff like hydro and wind, I've never seen another type of powerstation in sweden, so I can't say for sure there are none but I can say I have never seen one.

[@tomasletal257]

I've read a paper from 1940s about structural integrity of these things, where the authors complained that the required thickness from calculations is so small, that would be technologically difficult to build the tower with such thickness. Another complaint was that the tower is hard to demolish :D

[@TheDigger06]

My last job,they were 52 yr old no probs, and due to their shape,they demolish easy and v v neatly

[@tomasletal257]

@@TheDigger06 Did you use explosives at the foundation? In that case I could imagine the shape being beneficial. What I saw in the paper was visibly distorted tower, which was still standing. It is possible they used more material than required at the time. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the paper and my memory of it is not 100%.

[@chrisbrzon3917]

The tower's shell thickness is comparable to an egg's shell at scale....

[@astroyeaster9464]

​​@@tomasletal257I've seen videos of how they have to manually deconstruct power plants over the course of weeks. Don't know why they do it, maybe it's just regulations. Take my word with a grain of salt, though. Scratch that, I read that it takes several years to decommission a nuclear power plant. Don't know about the towers, but they apparently can't just be blown up, cause of contamination.

[@tomasletal257]

@@astroyeaster9464 In case of nuclear power plant, the towers shouldn't be contaminated. Still, by blowing such tower up (its actually blowing down), you could affect contaminated areas. Anyway, these towers are also used in non-nuclear power plants, where blowing up is an option.

[@GOKITTYxD3STROY3R]

One of my newest favorite youtube channels to wait for new uploads for. I love the way you teach in these videos and the effort put into each one is incredible.

[@maverickhusky4165]

16:00 This is facinating, I live in Las Vegas and I always wondered why evaporative cooling like this wasn't super common for things here.

[@perstaffanlundgren]

In Vegas regional cooling pipe systems for buildings to connect to ,really should be a good idea, how much of vegas electricity goes to hwac systems? I bet a lot ...

[@Jake-uc8mb]

Because Las Vegas needs to recover every drop of water that they can.

[@JimmyMon666]

We do have the Edward Clark Generating Station in Henderson on Russell and US95 (now called I-11). But it doesn't use big cooling towers, just small ones. It might be the fan type too, I can't tell from just seeing it from the freeway. I'm not sure what the power plants in Apex used, it's been a while since I been out that way. They shut the coal plants down, but I believe they have natural gas ones out there now. During the cooler months you see a lot of water vapor coming from them. I didn't see any tonight, it might be shut down for maintenance, or that electricity is not needed right now since it's not very cold. Most of our power is from outside the city, and this plant used to be outside the city at one time, but the city (cities) grew around it.

[@Catman_CM]

Okay, I have to say that picture of the smoke stacks and cooling tower rising up out of the fog is absolutely beautiful.

[@draudes657]

Thank you, I am aircraft/automotive engineer, it happened to see the open base of the cooling tower and I wandered how it works. I appreciate you passion to explain correctly, completely, I suppose in accessible way, WHITH PHISICAL MODELS (not easy to build) which WORK.

[@andriypredmyrskyy7791]

Grady, you've GOT to introduce the axes of a graph before you start talking about it, and skipping over "the bottom axis is temperature (dry bulb) and the side axis is absolute humidity, that is the grammes of water in each kilogram of air" makes it REALLY hard for people not to gloss over the chart. IT'S GOT RELATIVE HUMIDITY AT THE TOP! IT CUTS OFF WITH INCREASING HUMIDITY! This is a complicated graph and it deserves the time to be understood :p

[@myself248]

Yeah, I'm gonna probably spend a whole afternoon watching other videos to understand that chart. I left this video baffled but intrigued.

[@Rich-on6fe]

Humidity is a difficult thing to understand and communicate. We as humans have no real 'sense' of it and it needs analysis and exploration in its own right. Found this out when making and selling equipment that measured it,(among other quantities), and realising that we could not adequately measure and explain it to ourselves.

[@IndyJay53]

As he said, you can spend an entire course studying this chart (a course I happen to be in right now😅). I don't think it was really the point of the video to teach a thorough understanding of humidity mechanics. Just a teaser and enough info to get the general idea. I will agree, though, that it was certainly an eyes-glazed-over moment with the amount of information shown.

[@carlsaganlives6086]

The disrespect shown to this graph is cause for concern, if not outright alarm, agree.

[@matthewbeasley7765]

@@Rich-on6fe Not only is it complicated, there is a pile of misunderstanding people have. Few people can clearly articulate the difference between wet bulb temperature and dew point. I remember asking this as a kid in elementary science class and getting a deer in the headlights from the teacher.

[@wk8219]

5:35 I love that you are using a water heater leakage pan for the bottom of your home made cooling tower.

[@diytoptricks]

The amount of science packed into this explanation is incredible! I never realized how much thought goes into the design of cooling towers. The comparison to nature’s own cooling methods, like sweating, was such a cool touch!

[@OmikronTitan]

Always fun learning about turbans.

[@brianhaygood183]

You've got a Sikh sense of humor.

[@klschofield71]

I'm a little disappointed. He didn't talk about the application of various head coverings at all. Not once.

[@therealracer135]

Ok but how do you pronounce engine? Or does your car have an engyne in it?

[@leftpastsaturn67]

@@therealracer135 Something about fun and parties...

[@CSDragon]

1:00 RIP the bitrate

[@prathamchhetrivlogs3560]

??

[@prathamchhetrivlogs3560]

Explain

[@CSDragon]

@@prathamchhetrivlogs3560 explaining how bitrate works would take to long but basically when there's a lot of random change on the screen, like that part of the video, youtube kills the quality in order to not skyrocket the bitrate. So if you pause at 1080p, it might still look like 360p or 144p

[@bullymaguire169]

My first thought when i saw the rain 😂

[@knocknwalk]

Nice job, Grady. I knew about the overall nature of those hyperbola-based cooling towers, but you showed some interesting things to learn from details in that realm.

[@pennernderpenner]

The steam is also not released into the atmosphere because the output pressure of the turbine is often way below atmospheric pressure to maximise efficiency.

[@stopgabsolution5457]

To add, this is one of other functions of the condenser. Turning the steam into water creates a vacuum that lowers the output pressure of the turbine.

[@TheDigger06]

Steam isnt released at all,technically the steam you think u see is condensate

[@ScienciaMundi]

This is fantastic, and as an operations supervisor at a thermal power plant, I will use it as a guide when educating new hires and reviving senior operations staff. I'm grateful.

[@deansawich6250]

Thanks. I'm in HVAC and during my education we did psychometrics and it was confusing and I was happy to leave it behind. But when I became a professional I ran into a job where I had to dehydrate gummy sweets and this meant getting into psychometrics and the chart in a big way. From that moment I learned the magic of that chart (developed by Mr. Carrier). I became a fan of it and got to know more about air properties than I ever had dreamt of. As the moisture content goes up so does the vapour pressure and this can push paint off a wall. I taught Mechanical Engineers practical psychometrics as course for the local institute. What is important to understand is the latent heat transfer quantity per mass, that takes place when changing for liquid to vapour. It is immense. 😊

[@ramblingriver]

8:25 "Ignoring the moving parts, it has no moving parts."😆😅🤣

[@danrichards27]

something you didn't touch on that I immediately understood from your demonstration - temperature can be described as the average energy of particles which fall on a bell-ish curve (Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution). This system is allowing some of those high energy particle to escape up the chimney as steam, driving the convective forces. In that way, it has a bit of a temperature separator effect similar to a vortex chiller (but without the vortex obviously). That driven convection further cools the remaining cold side. Very cool, thanks for the demo.

[@rdallas81]

Well said.

[@CatzyCatzy]

I once worked at the Biloela power plant. It runs on Coal Seam Gas. The lake system is surprisingly small, yet the cooling towers and there is 2 actually runs so well. Before you ask, I was doing Hazmat removal in my work and am not a power plant staff. The power plant is located in Queensland, Australia.

[@mchagnon7]

A turbine is a rotating piece of machinery. A turban is a type of hat.

[@michaeljamesm]

but what if my hat shall be rotating :0

[@fredbergeron2193]

I hope you joking 🤣

[@tomgriffin820]

😂

[@Ralt_Alt406]

@@michaeljamesm Then you're a propeller head.

[@therealracer135]

What about the engyne in your car?

[@mccutcheogeoff]

The CANDU reactors in the bruce powerplant in Ontario Canada uses lake water to cool. But instead of drawing serface water they have a very long pipe that draws water from deap in the lake. Apparently this water is several degrees cooler than the water at the surface and will never freeze in the Canadian winters. On a side note the output of the cooling water has enough energy to stop a bit of the lake from freezing.

[@clarkesuperman]

Seeing the section about the structural integrity of cooling towers was pretty cool. There is an abandoned plastics plant by my house that had its own power plant. The cooling station has never been demolished and the cooling towers, which are situated on the roof of a wood truss structure, are collapsing seemingly by their own weight.

[@chadb9270]

6:39 it’s super easy to test. Most people probably have done this by accident. Fill a cup of water and leave it on the counter for a few hours. It will be colder than room temperature when you return.

[@ianriggs]

I love when videos talking about pollution show cooling towers like they are giving off pollution lol. Someone needs to teach them that its just steam coming out

[@jamesisaac7684]

Yeah it portrays as something bad. When is the opposite of that. It helps in reducing pollution and helping the environment.

[@Madshadowgolem]

The thing to remember is that extra moisture in the atmosphere has significant environmental impact too. This is the cleanest energy currently available but we can still do better. Using the heat for things that need heating makes more sense but takes much more planning for co-locating industry.

[@ianriggs]

@shadowgolem9158 ya releasing a whole lot of extra heat and steam into the atmosphere I'm sure isn't harmless but it's gotta beat pollutants and greenhouse gasses 🤷

[@OutbackCatgirl]

​@@Madshadowgolemit's literally orders of magnitude better, yeah it isn't completely harmless but it's still nearly the best we have

[@pcenero]

coal dust emits more deadly radiation than steam clouds.

[@markmcculfor6113]

You know his videos are good when a mechanical engineer (or at least 7/8ths of one) will listen to a civil engineer teaching thermodynamics! All kidding aside, I love your videos!

[@matthewbeasley7765]

I was waiting to see if you covered the applicability of natural draft cooling towers to dry locations. Back when I first started working at nuclear power plants, I noted that both Palo Verde (which you showed) in Arizona where it is hot and dry, plus Columbia Nuclear in Eastern Washington where it is cold and dry, don't use natural draft towers All other nuclear plants in the US with towers have natural draft towers. I asked the mechanical engineers I worked with why and none could answer. Puzzling it over, I came to the same conclusion you did. It is the fact that the initial density goes down when the initial wet bulb temperature is low enough. Dumping the water in the tower will eventually warm things enough to cause a draft, but that results in a higher condenser back pressure and a lower plant efficiency. Well done video! Just some minor points: - Temperature is very important to efficiency, especially with nuclear power plants. The initial steam conditions at nuclear power plants is much lower than coal or oil, resulting in much more of the total work being done below atmospheric pressure. The pressure drop is low, but the volume is absolutely massive on those last few rows of blades. Combined cycle power plants care MUCH less due to the conversion of energy starting from combustion temperature. (That whole Carnot thing...) - The name power plant engineers like to use for condenser cooling water is "circulating water". It is kind of descriptive, since it is just circulating around, never boiled. - Nuclear plants don't use the natural draft tower for safety systems with the exception of some of them that do use it as a third or fourth tier backup. Cooling of safety critical equipment is desired to be absolutely redundant with nothing shared between diverse safety systems. In the case of plants cooled by natural bodies of water, they'll use the one body of water for all safety systems if it is very reliable (no upstream or downstream dams that could take it out, etc...). Most of the use redundant ponds totally separated from each other. A good example of this extra source of cooling water is at Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. If you look to the south of the plant, there is a second earthen dam blocking off a cove. It has a high water outlet canal to the main reservoir. This extra cove can hold 30 days of shutdown water even if the main dam were to fail.

[@jasonbreen3632]

Thank you for taking time to add this excellent info! I'll offer just another small tidbit - There are other nuclear plants in the US with forced draft cooling towers, Farley in south Alabama and Hatch in south Georgia to name a couple.

[@jasonreed7522]

The nuclear plant near Oswego NY is somewhat interesting in how it has both a cooling tower, and uses Lake Ontario for cooling. Lake Ontario does have dams controlling its primary inflows amd outflow, but i doubt that posses a risk for the Oswego plant. Generally speaking the first powerplant draining the lake is a run of river facility, and the IJC tells them how much water to let flow down the river. (IJC = International Joint Commission of Boundary Waters) The IJC is trying to balance a lot of different needs ranging from ecology to recreation to commercial shipping. A dam failure would be really bad, but not because it would rapidly drain the lake. Montreal is downstream and 1in change in depth to Ontario would raise the river at Montreal by 33ft, if Ontario suddenly dropped enough to expose the inlets at Oswego then Montreal was probably removed from the map. (And multiple dams had to fail at once) Ultimately using the Great Lakes as your cooling source is like using an ocean except less angry. (No tides, tsunamis, or hurricanes/storm surge)

[@pipergohl962]

I laughed out loud at the shot at 12:12 featuring Grady Hospital. What a silly little easter egg haha!

[@justalonesoul5825]

Another brilliant, instructive, educative and very interesting video. Congratz!

[@picobyte]

PracticalEngineeringChannel Funfact, most of the white smoke from the coal/gas plant chimneys next to those cooling towers is also just water vapour. Burning natural gas produces lots of water and some invisible CO2. Coal plants produce lots of CO2 other stuff(depending on the sort of coal used) and less water. Proper filtering flue gasses has a step where water is used for cleaning those fumes and thus also producing white 'smoke'. You should do a video on how clean coal plants produce gypsum. It's very interesting.

[@wally7856]

If you can see it, it's not water vapor. It's just water in very small droplets (or tiny ice crystals if it's cold outside). Water vapor is 100% invisible.

[@qlue7881]

Thanks to my eldest brother working for Eskom in the late eighties, I had the privilege of getting a private tour of the, then newly completed, Kendal power station in Mpumalanga, South Africa Unit six hadn't been put into service yet and the tour included an inside look of unit six cooling tower That power station uses dry cooling rather than the wet cooling you describe so well in this video Kendal also has the largest cooling towers in South Africa (I think they're the largest in the Southern Hemisphere) They also have the the only trig beacon mounted on a man made structure in South Africa Their huge size is partly due to using dry cooling which requires a larger tower for the same level of cooling as a wet cooling tower, but requires less water

[@gordonrichardson2972]

I live near the old Athlone power station in Cape Town. The cooling towers had to be demolished because they were structurally unstable.

[@RB-bd5tz]

17:18 Even if "flue gas" is put into the tower, it's probably not "flue gas" per se; it's been heavily filtered to get rid of the harmful stuff, and it's no more than hot air and a little water vapor.

[@MooRhy]

It's still all of the CO2 and even if 99% of the other stuff gets filtered out that's still ten thousands of tons.

[@kanal7523]

4:57 The video compression algorithm did not like that lmao

[@borshardsd]

You blew my mind as an hvac tech. I would have guessed humid air fell! Great content!

[@typha]

I had heard that another reason for the shape is to save money on concrete, for that purpose a catenoid would be ideal (see minimal surfaces), but generally deemed too difficult to bother compared to the hyperboloid which is pretty close anyway.

[@yz250ftony]

My friends dad, an engineer, would run a lawn sprinkler next to the windows of his house and ran fans to pull that air through. He didn't run the air conditioner during the summer, house kept cool enough. Sprinkler had lots of small jets and cycled back and forth, spraying upwards next to the wondows.

[@Frantic857]

Trust in Jesus Christ, not antichrist. + I hope and pray that folks change their view and invite the Lord Jesus Christ into their life to rule and reign. + (Proverbs 16:18 > Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.) + Satan is referred to as the prince of the power of the air for good reason, he owns the airwaves on planet earth and is the god (little g) of this world. It is my hope and prayer that you choose the God (Big G) of heaven who controls the destiny of your eternal soul. + (Matthew 10:28 > And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.) (Proverbs 9:10 > The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.) (2 Corinthians 4:3-4 > [3]-But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: [4]-In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.) (Romans 10:9-10 > [9]-That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. [10]-For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.) (Romans 10:13 > For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.) (Ephesians 2:8-9 > [8]-For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: [9]-Not of works, lest any man should boast.) (Revelation 3:20 > Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me.) Is Jesus knocking at the door of your heart? Is this your opportunity for eternal salvation? If it is, I hope and pray that you open the door and invite Him in to your heart and life, in Jesus' name. Amen! All glory be to God. Amen!

[@paulb4661]

The main advantage of AC is that it dries the air being cooled, humidity is temperature dependent, simple, evaporative cooling creates moist air.

[@Frantic857]

@@paulb4661 Trust in Jesus Christ, not antichrist. + I hope and pray that folks change their view and invite the Lord Jesus Christ into their life to rule and reign. + (Proverbs 16:18 > Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.) + Satan is referred to as the prince of the power of the air for good reason, he owns the airwaves on planet earth and is the god (little g) of this world. It is my hope and prayer that you choose the God (Big G) of heaven who controls the destiny of your eternal soul. + (Matthew 10:28 > And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.) (Proverbs 9:10 > The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.) (2 Corinthians 4:3-4 > [3]-But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: [4]-In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.) (Romans 10:9-10 > [9]-That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. [10]-For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.) (Romans 10:13 > For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.) (Ephesians 2:8-9 > [8]-For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: [9]-Not of works, lest any man should boast.) (Revelation 3:20 > Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me.) Is Jesus knocking at the door of your heart? Is this your opportunity for eternal salvation? If it is, I hope and pray that you open the door and invite Him in to your heart and life, in Jesus' name. Amen! All glory be to God. Amen!

[@brianhaygood183]

​@@paulb4661yeah, in many parts of the US attempting that would rot the house out of fill it with mold. Very efficient where you can get away with it, though.

[@legalizefreedom451]

I used to have to go into the reactors for my old job. It would take about five or six hours to get in do to security and waiting for everything to be inspected, all my tools and equipment, and that was with an appointment. Just to do a 10 min job sometimes. Easy money, but it was boring. This just remined me of that. Cool video man!

[@chrisbrzon3917]

U will notice two typical styles of structural suppurt columns at the bottom: 1) diagonal X's or 2) meridianal [up and down]. We elected to precast meridianals on the SPX (formerly Marley) tower that we were the EPC on back in 2008 to 2012. The Doka forms used for the shell are 1.5m tall lift jump forms that have inclination and diameter adjustability. Shell thickness was about 8" at thinnest point near top under rim walkway. We sold our used Doka forms after we were done to the Vogtle nuke job.

[@spicemasterii6775]

6:15 Technology Connections: did someone say latent heat?

[@Vagabond820]

I GET IT!

[@danielpieper1730]

In the clip at 13:56 some artifacts in the footage can be seen. From my work as a camera technician in the motion picture industry, I learned that these artifacts come from gamma radiation. They are just a few (sometimes just one) completely lit up pixels over just a single frame. You would usually notice them very rarely in the footage. But when filming in locations with high natural radiation, you could come across them more often. I noticed four of those in the clip at 13:56 that was supposedly filmed near a radiation source ;)

[@mcrusty2507]

Good eye.

[@ExtraAmateur]

I work at a powerplant and have been inside while its working. Steamy like a spa inside. It was like a very foggy day. The updraft was amazing!

[@takkjuvod]

0:22 Never thought I see the Nuclear Power Plant nearby (KKW Grafenrheinfeld, Germany) in a youtube video. that Power Plant was decomissioned in 2015 if I remember correctly, with the cooling towers being demolished a few weeks ago. I always wondered how they were working and in my childhood I always thought that those towers were responsible for making all the clouds (maintaining the power plant in the summer months when we don't get as much rain and therefor clouds didnt really help that thought of mine) Great Video, and after years I finally do understand how these things work!

[@guillermorodriguez836]

9:06 there is a golden opportunity here for channel merch: a humidifier that looks like a cooling tower. I’ll take three, please

[@IOtheFifth]

5:03 holy bitrate batman

[@naamadossantossilva4736]

Yeah,such content destroys the KZbin compression algorithm.

[@LostLargeCats]

Lol yes that part made me chuckle as well. The algorithm was sweating.

[@dylanberger8701]

go go gadget pixel reducer

[@RJ9mech]

Really neat! This begs the question about commercial smokestacks and residential chimneys and the physics and engineering considerations for these. Maybe a video or series of videos on this might be feasible?

[@jacc7203]

A fun math connection: the hyperboloid is a "minimal surface" meaning it has zero mean curvature. This minimizes surface tension and makes a much stronger shape than other surfaces. It also means that you can build these surfaces using bubbles. All you need it a large circular ring of wire and a small circular ring of wire. Dip both in bubbles, pull them out of the bubbles, and place the small one in the larger one, "connecting" the bubbles. Pop the surface inside of the smaller ring, and slowly pull the smaller ring up, stretching the surface connecting the small ring to the large ring and BAM. Hyperboloid

[@Obu2who]

Great video! In engineering school I never put it together that humid air would be less dense than dry air, you learn something new every day.

[@michaelbrinks8089]

I would assume the humid air is more dense since it's holding more moisture & water is pretty heavy? Since dry air has less moisture, you would think it would be lighter/less dense. High humidity air contains less oxygen. While dry air contains more oxygen. So I guess that's in part why dry air is more dense.

[@Obu2who]

@@michaelbrinks8089 Water has a lower molecular weight (18) than O2 (32) or N2 (28), meaning that increasing the molar proportion/partial pressure of water vapor in air will decrease the average molecular weight of the mixture, decreasing the density for a given temperature and pressure. Since we mostly interact with water as a liquid it's easy to forget it's a lighter molecule than O2 or N2!

[@michaelbrinks8089]

@Obu2who Oh yeah it's 1 part oxygen 2 parts hydrogen. With hydrogen being the lightest element.....So it makes sense. Forget solar panels, I want a mini nuclear reactor to power my home. A piece of uranium the size of a golf ball outta do the trick. For 25 yrs of nonstop power 😂 The government bunkers might have nuclear power. Or giant propane tanks to run generators since it can be stored indefinitely.

[@ponyote]

Yay, Grady clears this up.

[@aceywacey5411]

This is the type of content I want to see all over youtube.

[@Zemaj]

That’s the principle behind the ‘Coolgardie cooler’ which used evaporative cooling 150 or so years ago way out in the deserts of Outback Australia to keep beer (and food I guess? Nah, just beer) cool before electricity was a thing.

[@t1mmy13]

Oh! I thought the water was pumped to the top and flowed down on the sides for the cooling effect. You learn something new every day!

[@chrisbrzon3917]

The head required would be massive...500 plus ft. Our pumping head was like 60 or 70 ft I recall between fill height and spray system losses. A bit more in winterization mode.

[@andrefinn5223]

13:56 - 14:02 Here you can see that the footage was made at a nuclear power plant. You can sometimes see white dots or streaks flashing, which are caused by high-energy electromagnetic radiation hitting the CCD sensor directly through the camera body.

[@Birkguitars]

That line at end about how great it is to use curves in a world of straight lines? It is a feature of hyperboloids that you can lay a straight edge against them and if you get the angle right it will touch along its entire length. So at that specific angle the sides are actually straight. If that doesn't make sense look at the bit with the two circles connected by rods. The rods don't bend so the curved shape is actually a series of very thin straight rods. The side effect of this is remarkably thin walls typically about 7 inches or 175 to 180mm. That is narrower than the length of my hand even for the 600 foot tall ones. The strength in that direction comes from the fact that the lines of force being imposed by gravity operate along those straight lines and by attaching each straight line to the next one they become self supporting. That is also the reason for the triangular vents at the bottom. The struts follow the lines of force. And if you ever see one being demolished they appear to tear apart like wet paper. As soon as it stops being self supporting it disintegrates. It really is s crazy form of engineering.

[@lawschuelke]

He discussed this in the middle of the video.

[@flamingspinach]

Not only was this mentioned in the video, it was actually demonstrated with a set of straight rods. 9:55

[@firefox5926]

1:00 i have always wondered why they cant just re heat the steam after the turbines and just skip the condensing phase altogether i mean at the end of the day its just a working fluid

[@pbflo6559]

My undersatnding is that condensing steam creates a vacuum improving efficiency and maximizing power output of low pressure steam turbine.

[@nirodper]

If you just heat the steam there won't be a pressure differential to drive it

[@twizylemoon8718]

I'm wondering that too. Maybe it has to do with expansion when transitioning from water to stam, because you need flow to enter turbine. I hope we get the answer. My first question was why even cool the steam if its on the edge of liquid. But then i figure it out that they heat steam a lot becasue it looses temperature in exchange for velocity when going through turbine.

[@ratvomit874]

You can. A good number of plants actually do exactly that, but after around 3 passes the diminishing returns make it infeasible to go further. Basically you can bring the steam back to the same temperature, but it'll still be at a lower pressure than when it first boiled, so your turbine needs to get bigger. And then you need to duplicate all the associated infrastructure and sync both stages of turbines and stuff. At some point it becomes so expensive and complex you might as well just condense the steam and start over. Also you don't actually need to kick out all the latent heat, you can actually use the steam to preheat the feedwater and hence recycle some of that heat. In fact your dinosaur car might already have such a device, it's called an intercooler.

[@westonzavadil8770]

For nuclear plants, it also used to be used as an auxiliary control rod system. You can see where the problem with that rises if a pump stops, water boils, steam absorbs less neutrons than water, more nuclear reaction more steam.... Hence why Chernobyl went into meltdown. Now they likely use it to take advantage of the transition temperature difference in water to steam and vice versa.

[@smurface549]

To give a little perspective to the effort of cooling down feed water of a power plant: I was visiting a nuclear power plant with an output of 1400MWe some years ago. They have evaporated about 700l (185 Gallons) of water per SECOND. So every second a whole bath tub of water just disappeared and needed to be replenished by water from a river - which obviously needed cleaning before it could be utilized. In that power plant they had a so called hybrid cooling tower, much lower than natural draft towers and with electric fans blowing air through it to prevent the formation of steam clouds. They alone took about 60 MW of the power produced by the plant. With a large power plant somehow nothing is easy anymore. Everything is just huge!

[@shemmo]

Waste heat can also be used for heating greenhouses, households

[@JohanHultin]

Yepp, I write this comment in the warmth of my home courtesy of a power station (and nearby paperpulp plant)

[@5th_decile]

In theory yes, but in practice it seems to be rare. Probably because of the safety/permanence requirement. But why don't they combine a heat grid with a cooling tower for backup?

[@perstaffanlundgren]

Nuclear powerplants are often built at a long distance from big cities, to make it "economically motivated " to connect them to the system " ,long distances kll the economics in regional heating systems. High energy losses , very long pipes are expensive to build and maintain ,high flow pressure losses in the pipes if they are long. Regional heating needs relatively high density /concentrated built inverments to be ,feasible. Not nesseery big citys but not to spread out.

[@5th_decile]

@@perstaffanlundgren greenhouses then?

[@Kandralla]

@@perstaffanlundgren More than just nuclear. Most combustion plants are the same way. The ones close enough to the core of a city to make this viable are rarely used because they're old (and frankly at this point even those are likely permanently shut down.

[@freezerguy]

In the industry “Fill” is technically called “drift eliminator” it serves to keep water from pooling in the air to increase its surface area to give up heat more efficiently.

[@anthonyhovens7488]

Actually not quite. Typically the fill is the fill with a layer of drift/mist eliminator on top above the spray nozzles to reduce liquid water loss out the tower.

[@steamer2k319]

Is the idea similar to a chimney (or maybe a bunch of little chimneys)? I.e., encourage verticality by restricting horizontal movement? I suppose it works in both directions? For both the upwardly convected vapor and the downwardly dropping condensation in the cross-flow?

[@anthonyhovens7488]

@@steamer2k319 nah, the fill is basically to make the water splash around as it falls making tiny droplets. The mist eliminator sits above everything including the spray nozzles (water inlets) to stop much of the tiny liquid water droplets being carried up by the updraft from escaping out the top as we want it to evaporate into vapour cooling the remaining liquid, not just be carried away as liquid. The towers main structure is what promotes particular air flow regimes...

[@steamer2k319]

@@anthonyhovens7488 👍 Should put another turbine at the top powered by the updraft and use it to drive a condenser. Maybe that would cross too much into complicated / less reliable?

[@anthonyhovens7488]

@@steamer2k319 The updraft is nowhere near strong enough for that and it would restrict the updraft reducing cooling effectiveness. Besides the condenser is "unpowered", its the pumps that are drawing the parasitic load. They can be up to 2MW each depending on the number, water flowrate needed, efficiency and condition of the pumps. Trying to draw energy from the updraft would be like adding a single piece of paper to a forest fire. In fact in most cases, we use forced drafts instead of natural convection because it cuts the cost by a factor of 4 for a mere 2% efficiency loss...

[@1320pass]

You're a good teacher Grady and the models are always a nice touch for the visual learner.

[@ChannelJeffrey]

I've noticed, over the last 10 or 12 videos that you have changed your look, I hope this comment goes unnoticed by everyone but you… But I think you would look really cool if you just found yourself the perfect hat 1:30

[@t.regisgaming2694]

Noticed

[@miquelbiggs5721]

Ouch

[@kladius8045]

Uhhhh... This commet somehow shows up even before 2.4k likes comment below.

[@SeanA099]

That isn’t smoke. It’s steam. Steam from the steamed clams we’re having. Mmm. Steamed clams.

[@RyanTenney]

I didn't say steamed clams, I said steamed hams!

[@michaelmoorrees3585]

@@RyanTenney -Either way, you're just making me hungry. Didn't know this was a food channel !?

[@definitelynotacrab7651]

I'm glad someone made this joke

[@jean-francoisavon62]

As usual, an OUTSTANDING explanation of how things work. Thank you for your amazing work !

[@longlakeshore]

Active cooling towers at Palo Verde NPP west of Phoenix AZ at 2:55 because passive cooling towers don't work well in dry desert air.

[@YunxiaoChu]

Why?

[@longlakeshore]

@@YunxiaoChu Thermodynamics. Check out Grady's explanation and the graph beginning at 14:10 of the video.

[@YunxiaoChu]

@ thx