Data center demand is growing at an almost alarming pace, largely driven by the AI boom. Some estimates predict more than triple annual growth by 2030. These facilities have continuous, mission-critical loads and are already facing increased scrutiny over water use. Data center servers create high, constant heat output with little to no seasonal variation. Operations must be both efficient and highly reliable under always-on conditions. Cooling towers, a common source of heat rejection for data centers that use water-cooled chillers, must be equally efficient and reliable.
Cooling Tower Challenges for Data Centers
Traditional open-loop cooling towers bring certain challenges, however. To eliminate contamination of the data center’s process water, an open circuit tower would require an add-on heat exchanger, which can introduce complications or even risks to a mission-critical operation. First are possible thermal inefficiencies. The bolt-on heat exchanger adds an extra heat transfer step, which can result in less efficient operations. This may be negligible in many cases, but it may be significant to mission-critical operations like data centers.
Perhaps more problematic are contamination risks. The water in open-loop towers is exposed to the atmosphere, allowing exposure to contaminants, scaling and biological growth. These can foul the surfaces of the heat exchangers and impair the efficiency of heat transfer, even with proper chemical treatment. This can also increase the amount and likelihood of failure points where emergency maintenance will be needed. For a cooling tower to go down in a data center could be catastrophic, and conventional cooling towers may take a few days or even weeks to properly repair safely.
How Tower Tech TTCC Exceeds Expectations for Data Centers
By flowing the facility’s process water (or glycol mixture) through enclosed coils within the tower, a closed loop cooling tower ensures that the process fluid never comes in contact with the cooling water, the atmosphere or debris. This design eliminates the add-on heat exchanger, supporting better chiller and economizer performance while reducing overall energy consumption. The closed-circuit design also helps maintain uptime: by keeping contaminants out of the isolated water supply, there is less opportunity for fouling and scaling to cause unplanned problems.
Tower Tech’s TTCC revolutionizes the closed-loop tower for data centers with its XchangeTech™ coils. Conventional closed-loop towers are metal, which are extremely heavy and prone to corrosion and scale buildup. The difficulty of replacement is so high that corroded coils will, in practice, often lead to an entire tower being replaced. This is enormously wasteful. XchangeTech uses 440 small-diameter polymer tubes with a thin wall to minimize thermal resistance, bundled together to provide a large primary surface area for heat transfer with a very low internal pressure drop. They are innately corrosion-resistant, have no thin fins, have a superior impact resistance and are compatible with water, glycols, brine, chlorides, oils and more. The vibration of air flowing over the polymer tubes prevents scale build-up on the coil surface, further reducing maintenance while increasing longevity. And perhaps most importantly they are much lighter weight: if they ever do need replacement, the difficulty is significantly lower than that of metal.
Additionally, Tower Tech’s water use also changes the game for data centers. Public scrutiny is increasing for how “thirsty” data centers are, so any water savings are a massive advantage. Tower Tech’s commitment to sustainable efficiency has led to a design with an industry-leading drift rating of 0.0004% and significant water and chemical use in tower operations.
And like all Tower Tech towers, the TTCC models are made of Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP), so they are innately resistant to corrosion and are significantly lighter than metal. They are factory-preassembled towers and delivered to sites in a single piece, which saves time and cost on installation. They have a smaller overall footprint due to their upside-down design without side louvers and with a series of smaller, bottom-mounted fans.
A closed-loop design helps directly address the operational and risk-management priorities of data centers.
