MIT Engineers Find a Way to Save Energy and Make Water Boil More Efficiently

upstart writes:

MIT Engineers Find a Way To Save Energy and Make Water Boil More Efficiently:

At the heart of a wide range of industrial processes, including most electricity generating plants, many chemical production systems, and even cooling systems for electronics, is an energy-intensive step with the boiling of water or other fluids.

They could significantly reduce their energy use by improving the efficiency of systems that heat and evaporate water. [R]esearchers have now found a way to do just that, with a specially designed surface treatment for the materials used in these systems.

Three different kinds of surface modifications, at different size scales, together account for the increased efficiency. The new findings are described in a paper published in the journal Advanced Materials by recent MIT graduate Youngsup Song PhD '21, Ford Professor of Engineering Evelyn Wang, and four others at MIT. The scientists caution that this initial finding is still at a laboratory scale, and more effort is required to develop a practical, industrial-scale process.

High-speed video of the researchers' test setup shows water boiling on a specially treated surface, which causes bubbles to form at specific separate points rather than spreading out in a film across the surface, thus leading to more efficient boiling. The video has been slowed down by 100 times to show more detail.

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