WERC Environmental Design Competition

The 2026 WERC team participated in the WERC Environmental Design Contest, organized by New Mexico State University. This design competition encourages collaboration among industry, government, and academics to address a multitude of real-world challenges.

The 2026 WERC team picked Task 2 Power Plant in the Desert: Recovering Water from Cooling Towers. This specific category challenged teams to reduce water loss through evaporation without compromising cooling tower performance or the power plant’s day-to-day operations in water-scarce areas. They selected the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station in Tonopah, AZ, as the power plant on which to base the model and location.

The WERC team, through research and professional contacts, has developed a retrofit design for the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station Cooling Towers in Tonopah, AZ. The design includes a 3D Onshape model, material considerations, and a bench scale model.

This year’s MTU WERC Competition team deserves congratulations attended the WERC Environmental Design Contest in April, presenting their research and design results: winning 1st in their category for their bench-scale demonstration!

Their specific category challenged teams to reduce water loss through evaporation without compromising cooling tower performance or day-to-day operations of the power plant in water-scarce areas. The team selected the Palo Verde Generating Station, located in Tonopah, Arizona, to model their climate and day-to-day operation considerations after.

The WERC Team developed an impressive louver system final design: where optimized geometric and material parameters encourage cycles of chilled water to be collected. Throughout the fabrication and modeling process, an estimated 4% increase in water retention between the control and louver system was observed. The team ultimately concluded that the design would provide their modeled location 1 million gallons of water collected a day, saving $7.2 million in water costs!