冷卻水塔普遍應用在發電廠、化學工廠、鋼鐵廠及大型冷凍空調系統。上述場所產生或消耗的電量都極為龐大，其操作系統之熱效率可經由冷卻水塔效能改善及操作調節而得到提升。本研究構想評估既有冷卻水塔的效能，及提出改善診斷，以期在節能減碳上能有所貢獻。
本研究對於冷卻水塔的特性值做了初步的探討，並與美國冷卻水塔協會（Cooling Tower Institute, CTI）建立之冷卻水塔使用標準規範，所明定的冷卻水塔效能評估方法做比較。因為CTI對於實驗條件訂定得比較嚴謹，一般工廠中的冷卻水塔無法去獲得符合實驗條件的數據。CTI有提到，若實驗數據沒有符合訂定的實驗條件，雖然也可以對效能作評估，但是計算結果會有誤差。以本研究方法來取代CTI的方法，即可減少CTI效能評估的誤差，建立較完整的特性曲線，其效率計算結果也較為客觀。
本研究方法改良自CTI的效能評估方法，以局部模型網路(Local Model Networks, LMN)來建立冷卻水塔模型，如此可以針對不同的冷卻水塔做研究，也不會影響該冷卻水塔的正常操作，提升了本研究方法的方便性與準確性。但需注意若工廠操作的數據超出建模數據的範圍，則模型在預測上可能會失準，所以需將超出的數據再納入模型中重新訓練冷卻水塔的模型。

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