Cooling efficiency of a natural draft dry cooling tower may significantly decrease under crosswind con dition. Therefore, many researchers attempted to improve the cooling efficiency under this condition by using structural or mechanical facilities. In this article, alternative shell geometry with elliptical cross section is proposed for this type of cooling tower instead of usual shell geometry with circular cross sec- tion. Thermal performance and cooling efficiency of the two types of cooling towers are numerically investigated. Numerical simulations show that cooling tower with elliptical cross section improves the cooling efficiency compared to the usual type with circular cross section under high-speed wind moving normal to the longitudinal diameter of the elliptical cooling tower.
