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 For the past 20 years, Rod Applegate, the owner and president of Tower Engineering, Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas has been searching for a better method of driving fans in cooling towers. He says he has finally found what he has been looking for in Baldor’s new RPM AC™ Direct Drive Cooling Tower Motors and Baldor VS1 Cooling Tower Drives.
Since 1986, Applegate’s company has been designing and installing high quality cooling towers for the large institutional market, including hospitals, universities and airports. They all use an air conditioning system that requires a cooling tower to exchange heat and return cooled water back to the chiller.
These towers use large high inertia fans to pull air over a water soaked media to cool the water as part of the process. The most common method for driving the fan in modern cooling towers has been a right-angle gear reducer, drive shaft and disc coupling arrangement, along with a standard foot mounted AC motor.
“I have always wanted to get rid of these gearboxes and all of the other moving parts,” says Applegate. “Misalignment, excessive vibration and noise are all inherent problems with this system. With the high speeds, the gearboxes generate too much heat, and the seals and bearings can have very short lives.
There are just too many things that can go wrong.” There is also a significant maintenance issue for the owner. “Keeping up with regular oil changes of the gearbox and inspections of the flexible elements are critical,” says Applegate. “Ignoring either of these two can, and has, resulted in the catastrophic failure of equipment.”
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