Crosswind is a significant concern for natural draft dry cooling towers. The concern is more serious for shorter towers. Therefore, the crosswind influence is a significant threat to the use of natural draft dry cooling towers in concentrating solar thermal power plants, which are generally built at sizes smaller than conventional fossil-fired plants and employ relatively shorter towers. While some numerical studies and small lab-scale test reports exist, very few full scale experimental studies have been reported for conventional cooling towers and none for relatively short cooling towers suitable for renewable thermal power plants. To address this gap, a 20-m tall fully instrumented natural draft dry cooling tower was built by the University of Queensland. The tower was designed to serve a future 1-MWe concentrating solar thermal plant on the same site. Its performance was tested under different ambient temperatures and crosswind speeds. The detailed experimental data of the crosswind condition, air temperature distribution inside and outside of the cooling tower and the cooling performance are presented. The experimental data demonstrate the substantial yet complex impact of the crosswind on cooling tower performance. Significant non-uniformities in air and hot water temperature distributions and strong air vortices inside the tower were observed in high crosswind speeds. Unlike tall cooling towers used in large conventional plants, the cooling tower performance does not monotonously decrease with the increase of the crosswind speed. In fact, after the tower performance drops to its lowest level at a wind speed around 5 m/s, the trend is reversed and further increases in the crosswind speed help the tower performance. Analysis shows that this reversal occurs because the tower heat transfer mechanism changes. As crosswind rises above the critical speed, the airflow inside the cooling tower becomes increasingly controlled by the crosswind instead of the natural draft.

侧风是自然通风干式冷却塔的重要问题。对于较短的塔架，这种担忧更为严重。因此，侧风影响对在集中式太阳能热力发电厂中使用自然通风的干式冷却塔构成了重大威胁，该自然风干式冷却塔的建造规模通常小于传统的化石燃料发电厂，并采用相对较短的塔架。尽管存在一些数值研究和小型实验室规模的测试报告，但针对常规冷却塔的全规模实验研究却很少，而适用于可再生火力发电厂的相对较短的冷却塔则没有报道。为解决这一差距，昆士兰大学建造了一座20米高的设备齐全的自然通风干式冷却塔。该塔的设计目的是为同一地点的未来1-MWe集中式太阳能热电厂提供服务。在不同的环境温度和侧风速度下对其性能进行了测试。给出了侧风条件，冷却塔内外空气温度分布以及冷却性能的详细实验数据。实验数据证明了侧风对冷却塔性能的巨大而复杂的影响。在高侧风速度下，观察到塔内的空气和热水温度分布明显不均匀，并形成强烈的空气涡流。与大型常规工厂中使用的高层冷却塔不同，冷却塔性能不会随侧风速度的增加而单调下降。实际上，在风速大约为5 m / s时塔性能下降到最低水平之后，这种趋势就会逆转，侧风速度的进一步提高有助于塔的性能。分析表明发生这种逆转是因为塔的传热机理发生了变化。当侧风超过临界速度时，冷却塔内的气流越来越受到侧风而不是自然通风的控制。