Recent large cooling towers with special emphasis on buckling safety

Large Natural Draft Cooling Towers (NDCTs) are inevitable components of modern thermal power stations. In order to increase the plant efficiencies, and to reduce CO₂-emissions, power plants worldwide grew considerably in size, (Krätzig et al. 2009) and so did their NDCTs, see Fig. 1. This draws a series of design problems for these shell structures into the foreground, about which the lecture will report: Since transportation of fresh concrete onto greater heights increases costs with altitude, wall thicknesses of large NDCTs are minimized, such that buckling safety requires increasing attention (Krätzig et al. 2014). Durability of the tower shell and its supports becomes much more important for large cooling towers, because long enduring interruptions of power production for possible rehabilitation works are completely out of question (Jun et al. 2015).