Why are cooling towers at nuclear power plants shaped the way they are?

A cooling tower has a parabolic shape to improve cooling capabilities. Cooling towers act as a large radiator to cool water used to cool the turbines, much like a radiator in your car.

Inside near the base of the cooling tower there is water distribution system that evenly distributes the hot water from steam driven turbines. As the water is distributed and falls to a pool below it heats the air. As we all know heat rises. The heated air carries a huge amount of water vapor along with it up through the cooling tower. The large opening at the base allows a large volume of air to enter the tower. As the moist heated air rises, the air speed increases due to the constriction made by the parabolic shape of the cooling tower. This is called the Venturi Effect. It act much like the carburetor in your car.

As the moist heated air travels at an increased speed there is a reduction of pressure through the constriction. Above the constriction, the diameter of the cooling tower expand. As the hot moist accelerated air enters the larger space, the moist air rapidly expands. This causes a decrease in temperature and chills the moisture or water content in the air. Much like the evaporator on your air conditioner. The colder water falls down through the cooling tower into the pool below to be reused to cool the turbine. As the heated air exits the top of the cooling tower, it also carries with it a quantity of water vapor caused by the rapid expansion of the air. Thus, when you see a water vapor plume exiting the cooling tower, you can be assured the turbine is in use producing electricity we all depend on for our everyday living.

In other words, a large volume of heated air rises up the cooling tower carrying with it a large quantity of moisture and water vapor. The parabolic shape cause a restriction in the air flow through the cooling tower. This cause an increased air speed. As the air rises above the constriction it rapidly expands and cause evaporation. The evaporation chills the air and cools the moisture and water vapor. The cooler water is heavier and falls back into the pool below to be reused again and again to cool the steam driven turbines.

If the base of the tower is properly anchored to the foundation so as to furnish static constraint, the shape is such as to prevent any part of the structure from going into tensile stress during a wind-imposed side load.

First of all, it's not only nuclear power plants that have cooling towers. Below is a picture of the "Jax Coal Plant" in Jacksonville, Florida:

Why do power plants need cooling towers? Well in the case of a coal plant like the Jax plant, they release a lot of heat burning all that coal. The heat has to have some place to go, hence the plant needs cooling. Same applies for nuclear power plants: they heat up water and that heat needs to go somewhere so it does not build up to dangerous levels inside the plant. Hence nuclear plants have cooling towers too.

Why are the cooling towers that specific shape? Well, they need to be as wide as possible to increase the surface area-- if they were super narrow you'd have a very powerful jet of steam racing through the constriction and that might be dangerous and cause unnecessary pressure on the cooling tower.

Why not just make them wide but straight instead of curved? The hyperboloid shape is more structurally sound. If this doesn't make intuitive sense to you, read the Wikipedia article on Hyperboloid structure or search Google.

The design of a power station cooling tower is such as to meet a number of requirements:

1. Heat loss rate
2. Water recycling
3. Structural strength

Basic operational model

(See schematic below) Hot water flows to the cooling tower in pipes to sprays on the inside of the cooling tower, at elevated positions. Water drops from the sprays towards capture ponds at the bottom.

Cool air is used to cool the falling water: the cool air enters through the bottom gaps and flows upwards through the inside of the cooling tower. As the air rises, it meets the falling water droplets, cooling them and gaining heat. The warmer air rises through the tower towards the narrowest point, increasing in velocity as it does so. After the air has passed the narrow point, mixing with atmospheric air begins. As it mixes with the air it is cooled more rapidly , keeping the top of the cooling tower at a lower pressure than the bottom, thus maintaining air flow.

Design and Compromises

Heat loss rate

Reason for general shape: hollow structure is required through which hot air from the bottom, to a cooler top, which is at a lower pressure. More air flowing through the tower means better cooling, so a tower allowing more air to pass through is best (wider tower, more gaps at bottom). The air flow is driven by the difference between, the pressure just after contact with the hot water temperature, and the pressure of the air just outside the top of the cooling tower. This pressure difference is a function of the gradient between the air temperature as it interacts with the hot water on its way up, and the temperature of the air outside the top of the cooling tower.

Water recycling

The hot water should ideally all fall to the collection ponds after being cooled by the air.

However, some of this water evaporates, following the air column upwards to the atmosphere. It is therefore necessary to limit the speed of the air flowing through the inside of the tower to reduce water loss to evaporation. This can be done by limiting the temperature gradient between the top and bottom of the tower, i.e. limit tower height (hot air rises more quickly through a relatively cooler stream of air), and/or limit flow rate of hot water through the sprays of a single cooling tower (build more cooling towers).

Structural strength

For functional reasons, the cooling tower could well be a series of straight line cones, but the hyperbolic shape of the sides of the cooling tower provide very good strength as compared to other shapes (Ref).

Also, most cooling towers I've seen have the hyperboloid shape extend past the narrowest point by what appears to be roughly the same amount. Is there a reason for this?

If one can get away with lowering the neck of the hyperbola, but the base remains wider than the top, for a fixed minimum diameter, this clearly means less average diameter, and thus less building material costs.

Schematic of a cooling tower (Ref)

The hyperboloid form is an economic compromise. This shape is made entirely of straight lines. Imagine a cylinder with maybe 40 I-beams vertical and parallel to one another. Now pick it up, (I forgot to say imagine a small one, just control minus it a few times. Perfect.) and now give the top and bottom circle a 15 degree twist in opposite directions, like you do with your aluminum plant grinder. You have your hyperboloid structure. If you don't like to imagine geometric objects, a handful of pencils or straws on a tabletop will do nicely. Once you see it, you can conclude that it is in fact a very easy shape to build, even on the massive scale of your typical Homer Simpson workplace. anything else is far more expensive to design, validate, and build. "We" built those things to save money, right?