District Cooling companies and owners of chiller systems spend a significant amount of money for maintaining cooling towers – specifically in overcoming such challenges as scaling, bacteria and corrosion. The chemical additives that are currently being used to address scaling have environmental implications; for instance, they contaminate the ground water when discharged.

Dan Mizesko is the Managing Partner at Al Shirawi US Chiller services

As an alternative to this, Dan Mizesko, Managing Partner at Al Shirawi US Chiller Services, has proposed the use of the pulsed-power technology for advanced water treatment in cooling towers. The biggest advantage, apart from the fact that it is non-chemical in nature, is that, it helps resolve the issue of scaling, he said.

Explaining the mechanism, Mizesko said that during the evaporation process, water left behind dissolved minerals, such as, calcium carbonate, that precipitated and formed a layer along the insides of the cooling tower, causing scaling.

The pulsed-power technology, he said, imparted “pulsed, high-frequency electric fields into flowing water”, which changed the solid precipitate form to a “harmless powder”. The technology, he added, activated the naturally occurring suspended particles in the water, by removing the static electric charge on the surface. When the charge was removed, he said, it made them the preferred surface for precipitation for minerals to deposit, which did not allow the solids to precipitate on the inner surface of the tower, preventing scale formation.

The coated particles – the solids combined with suspended particles, he said, could be removed from the cooling tower basin through filtration or centrifugal separation.