The Top Chemicals Used in Cooling Tower Water Treatment
Implementing a regular cooling tower water treatment program is necessary to maintain safe and reliable operations. Making sure that you select the proper cooling water treatment chemicals will help ensure that you:
- Maintain high water efficiency
- Reduce corrosion and scale
- Increase cooling tower performance
- Improve system longevity
In order to get these benefits, you have to tailor your water treatment program to the specific conditions of your cooling tower.
Why Do I Need Cooling Tower Water Treatment?
Cooling towers need water treatment in order to keep operational costs low and cooling efficiencies high. If you don’t treat your water – or choose the wrong chemicals – you are at a higher risk of common cooling tower problems such as corrosion, scale, and microbiological buildup.
While these issues can lead to cooling tower damage and added downtime for repairs, they can also create operational efficiencies by impacting heat transfer. If scale, grime, or microbiological buildup coats your heat transfer surfaces, it impairs your tower’s water-cooling ability, meaning you have to run up operational and energy costs.
What are the Chemicals used in Cooling Tower Water Treatment?
Cooling tower water treatment often uses a variety of mechanical filtration and side-stream filtration methods, but the performance and effect of your water treatment are often dependent on what chemicals you use. Chemically treating cooling tower water helps to balance the chemical properties of the water itself, putting it in the right state for other methods of treatment. Here are the main chemicals that are frequently used in cooling tower water treatment:
Corrosion and Scale Inhibitors
If you want to prevent the degradation of your cooling tower, corrosion and scale inhibitors such as ChemREADY’s KOOL TOWER series products can help delay or prevent scale formation within your system. Low dosages of only a few ppm or less are often all that’s needed to prevent cooling tower scale for extended periods of time, making these products highly efficient.
Algaecides and Biocides
Controlling microbiological growth is key to maintaining optimal water conditions. Using carefully selected biocides in conjunction with dispersants, you can control any buildup and the resulting bio-corrosion that occurs under slime deposits. For total system control, you can have both oxidizing and non-oxidizing biocides depending on your water treatment needs.
pH Adjusters
Alkalinity adjusters or pH adjusters can help reduce the corrosion in a cooling tower, as lower pH levels can accelerate corrosion. ChemREADY recommends keeping your cooling tower water at a pH of around 10 or above. If you need to increase the pH level of your water, you can use an alkalinity adjuster like ChemREADY’s pHREADY to keep your cooling tower free of corrosion.
What are Ultra-Concentrated Products and Do I Need Them?
While standard water treatment chemicals are often shipped water-heavy, ultra-concentrated products minimize added water to create the highest concentration of active ingredients possible. This is the same idea behind soap mixes or laundry detergent pods. The end result is a product that has about 90-98 percent active ingredients.
Plant managers are turning more and more toward ultra-concentrated products since they eliminate many of the problems with standard, non-concentrated products. Non-concentrated products are often hard to work with and have serval issues such as:
- Increased shipping costs
- More leaks/spills
- Space-wasting drums
- Heavy containers that require forklifts to move
Ultra-concentrated products instead ship in small containers that weigh only a few pounds or less, allowing your operators to easily carry them around the plant and store them efficiently. When formulated correctly by a cooling tower water treatment expert, ultra-concentrated can perform just as well – or better – than standard products. Anyone interested in more efficient cooling tower water treatment should consider using ultra-concentrated chemical products.
KOOL TOWER 121: A Better Solution for Cooling Tower Water Treatment
The best water treatment plan is one that is easy to follow. Instead of using a slew of different chemical products to treat your cooling tower water, KOOL TOWER 121 offers a single, cost-efficient way to optimize your water treatment.
Representing the most efficient cooling tower water treatment product on the market today, KOOL TOWER 121 is an environmentally friendly, all-organic liquid ultra-concentrate with 99% active ingredients. KOOL TOWER 121 offers a powerful blend of anti-scalants, polymeric dispersants, and crystal modification compounds to help control calcium carbonate buildup and other causes of scale or fouling.
For additional protection, KOOL TOWER 121 uses redundant organic ferrous and non-ferrous corrosion control agents. The ultra-concentrate also resists degradation from bromine/chlorine compounds and other oxidizing sources. KOOL TOWER 121 has the capabilities to take on the toughest corrosion challenges, offering benefits such as:
- Greater reductions in biofilms
- Lower microbiocide dosage levels
- Improved anti-corrosion rates
- Real-time monitoring with commercial on-line fluorescent tracing ion analyzers
KOOL TOWER 121 has a 60%+- 28 day biodegradability profile and meets the highly stringent European EEOCD standard for biodegradability.
Better Cooling Tower Water Treatment at ChemREADY
ChemREADY makes cooling tower water treatment easy. With our water treatment expertise and extensive line of chemical products, we can help improve the performance and efficiency of your cooling towers.
Contact ChemREADY today to learn how you can optimize your cooling tower water treatment for maximum system performance and longevity.