Theoretical and Experimental Solutions of Cooling-Tower–Soil System

In recent years, there have been many papers on dynamic properties of cooling towers. However, the bottoms of the tower shells were assumed as a fixed boundary, or discrete column systems of towers were considered as elastic boundary conditions. In the present paper, tower shells and discrete supports are treated as before. Furthermore, a dynamic model of an infinite soil is developed, and dynamic properties of the whole system of the cooling tower have been calculated. Model tests of free vibrations of cooling towers on different simulated soils are investigated. The numerical and experimental results are in agreement. The results show that the elasticity of the soil reduces the natural frequencies of the cooling tower and the reduced value depends on the stiffness of the soil. Some of the mode shapes of the cooling tower are changed much as compared to a built-in tower.