Which oil cooler is better :- Air cooled Oil Cooler or Water cooled Oil Cooler ?

Let’s take a closer look at a water based oil cooling system (Fig. A). The hot oil from the equipment is pumped through the shell of a water cooled heat exchanger & the cooling water is passed through the tubes. There is exchange of heat between the hot oil & the cooling water. The hydraulic oil air cooler is returned back to the oil sump or reservoir. The water after it has performed its function of removing the heat from the oil, is itself now warm and has lost the ability to further extract heat efficiently. What do we do with this water? In the olden days it was simply flushed away and more fresh water was used for cooling. With growing environmental concerns coupled with the scarcity and cost of fresh water, it needs to be recirculated. In order for it to be effectively re-used as a cooling media, the water needs to lose the heat that it has picked up and be cool enough to be able to remove heat efficiently from the oil. For this the warm water is then pumped to a cooling tower where an air draft is used to cool it. There are two processes involved here – the cooling of oil using water, which in turn gets heated & the cooling of hot water with ambient air. As we know that no process is 100% efficient. Assuming we have two well-designed processes, each having an overall efficiency of say 80%, we have 20% loss of efficiency in each process. From (Fig. A) of a water cooled oil cooling system it is evident that we have a total loss of efficiency of 20% + 20%.Read More

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