Case Study: Evaporative Cooling for Badwater, California

By Munters

Just a few miles from the town of Badwater, in Death Valley California, the personnel at the National Park Service's Cow Creek Maintenance Facility have quite a task maintaining comfortable working conditions at reasonable cost within their various shops. Daytime temperatures routinely hover around 110°F during summer months and can go to 130°F. Summer design for the facility is 121°F DB and 77°F WB. Badwater, CA is located at the lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level where yearly rainfall averages less than two inches per year.

The Wet Bulb (WB) depression is ideal for evaporative cooling but the water quality in all of Death Valley is quite poor. The California Department of Water Resources, in Ground Water Bulletin 118, updated in 2003, reports that "TDS concentration ranges from about 240 to as much as 19,104 mg/L (1116.0 grs/ per US gallon) at Badwater. TDS concentrations exceeding 1000 mg/L (58.4 grs/gal) were found in 13 of 37 locations sampled with an average concentration of about 1940 mg/L (113.3 grs/gal)."