Karen Gleason wants the world to generate electricity more efficiently. Condensation is a part of the processes of air conditioning, desalination and most importantly coal burning power plants. Her moonshot idea is to change the way we harness energy from condensation.
Eighty five percent of global electricity generation uses condensation, and in 2011 22,000 TerraWatt hours of electricity were produced. Worldwide efficiency of this generation was only thirty two percent.
Gleason takes us through the process that a steam power plant uses to generate electricity. Boilers transform water into high pressure steam that drives the electricity-generating turbines. The focus of this talk is the steam that exits the turbines and enters the condenser.
https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/karen-gleason-efficiency-from-hydrophobic-surfaces
Power plant condensation happens on a massive scale. The equivalent of ten trillion gallons of water cycles through condensers every year. Ideally the temperature in the condenser would be as close as possible to the temperature of the cooling water.
Adding a very thin coating to the metal in the condenser creates hydrophobic surfaces, and this allows for better heat transfer between the condenser and the steam. Early estimates say that the coating outperforms traditional processes by a factor of seven.
The coating is required to be very thin to keep it from inhibiting the heat transfer between metal and steam, and also required to be hydrophobic. Additionally the coating is required to be durable, to continuously take advantage of the heat transfer gains.
Karen has developed a chemical vapor deposition film in her MIT laboratory that outperforms current coating methods. For the overall power cycle the process is estimated to increase efficiency by three to four percent. This would result in an electricity gain of 664 to 886 TerraWatt hours per year.
Gleason developed the coating using semiconductor materials as inspiration. Her team focused on materials that were less than thirty nanometers, had a high rate of adhesion, and could easily scale to large areas.
I taught thermodynamics for ten years and any time a speaker goes through the power generation process I'm completely interested. This innovation would seemingly shoot global power generation to new levels with a very low level of effort. It's rare to see a radical idea to solve the world's electricity needs using the technology we already have in place.
The plan to implement this ambitious project is three steps - first more evaluation needs to be done on lab-scale prototypes. Next the iCVD coating needs to be scaled up to a full reactor. Finally the coating will be evaluated with a power plant partner. These are huge steps that will require immense amounts of work but the benefit will be worth the effort.
https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/karen-gleason-efficiency-from-hydrophobic-surfaces