Carrier’s Residential HVAC manufacturing facility in Indianapolis features two cooling towers on site that are more than 30 years old and are due for a replacement. Cooling towers are heat exchangers that help regulate indoor air temperature by dissipating heat from recirculating water used to cool chillers, air-conditioning equipment, or other process equipment. Purdue EEE Senior Design team students will have the opportunity to work with Carrier engineers to find a replacement for these cooling towers that will allow Carrier to reduce its facility’s water and energy consumption while implementing proper cooling tower best management practices. Reductions will be accomplished by understanding cooling tower chemistry and proper operational parameters and procedures of this facility.

UPDATE
The overall objective of our project is to determine the optimal solutions for the cooling towers located Carrier’s Indianapolis facility. Our goal is to reduce Carrier’s water and energy consumption in the process and observe cooling tower best management practices when evaluating the systems. For the scope of our project, we consider both a potential redesign of the current systems in place or a complete replacement of the cooling towers altogether. To achieve this objective. Currently, we have provided our client with a deliverable that consists of recommendations based off our research as to where we believe water efficiency improvements can be best made in the cooling towers, and are in the process of collecting quotes from vendors to determine how much the redesign and replacement of Carrier’s two cooling towers will cost. With this data, we can move forward with the project to determine whether a redesign or replacement of the cooling towers is the optimal solution using a financial model.