New surface treatments could save energy for systems used in many industries. 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
MIT engineers design new surface treatments that 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.
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. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
The key to the new surface treatment is to add textures at several different size scales. Electron microscope images show millimeter-scale pillars and dents, whose surfaces are covered with tiny nanometer-scale ridges to improve the efficiency of the boiling reaction. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
“Those micro cavities define the position where bubbles come up,” he says. “But by separating those cavities by 2 millimeters, we separate the bubbles and minimize the coalescence of bubbles.” At the same time, the nanostructures promote evaporation under the bubbles, and the capillary action induced by the pillars supplies liquid to the bubble base. That maintains a layer of liquid water between the boiling surface and the bubbles of vapor, which enhances the maximum heat flux.
“Showing that we can control the surface in this way to get enhancement is a first step,” she says. “Then the next step is to think about more scalable approaches.” For example, though the pillars on the surface in these experiments were created using clean-room methods commonly used to produce semiconductor chips, there are other, less demanding ways of creating such structures, such as electrodeposition.
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