Cooling tower fan silencing by conventional means is often both very difficult and very costly as the problem is usually low frequency in nature so conventional silencers and noise barriers don’t work. Despite this fact, the cooling tower world is awash with placebo silencers and acoustic barriers that are just a waste of money. Alternatively…
… quite often there are low-cost source control alternatives. For example, the dominant environmental noise problem from a food processing plant in the middle of a village was caused by cooling tower noise from a pair of units – despite the large silencers already fitted to the axial fan exhausts. We devised engineering modifications that produced a substantial improvement in the efficiency of the cooling towers that, coupled with measures to reduce the noise from falling water, not only cut the overall noise level from the units by 15dB(A), but also substantially reduced running costs.
