DropWise has developed a slippery coating that could dramatically cut the emissions from power plants by making them far more efficient. The coating works with any kind of power plant that relies on steam-driven turbines: coal, natural gas, solar thermal, geothermal, biomass and nuclear.
In these power plants, steam passes through a turbine and is captured in a water condenser that cools it down and turns it into a liquid. This process of hot steam meeting a coolant creates suction that pulls the steam through the turbine to turn the blades and generate electricity. The coating would be applied on the condenser surfaces making it slippery so that the water droplets would be sucked through far more easily instead of building up on the surface, making the turbine much more efficient.
The coating could be added by passing two gasses into the condenser that with the addition of heat would react to form a thin coating within. By controlling the temperature and pressure during the process, DropWise says it can achieve nanometer-level accuracy.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:24AM
I'm gonna buy "Big Bruce" and invite him in!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:53AM
In theory, I'm sure it works great. 8-|
They can come ask me for my millions once they get past the marketing sell and actually do it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Wednesday September 02 2015, @05:27AM
so, they need to control temperature, and pressure while this stuff is applied. Which means they need to shut down and drain sections of power plants. The cost saving has to be greater than the shut down cost, or this will only be used on while building a new plant, or possibly when re-furbishing one.
Also depends on the real-world life span of the coating, too.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Wednesday September 02 2015, @06:03AM
I also wonder how much of the coating adheres to the surface of the condenser and how much goes out the stack? There's only so much that can be deposited at a time, and in the US, we have the general rule "more is better." So, no matter what the adhesion rate, the chemicals will be dumped at a rate faster than can be applied to the condenser. That leads me to some other fun questions.... What would the EPA think of clouds of hydrophobic particles drifting downwind of your local power plant? What happens when all the surfaces in your scrubber get saturated with this coating? What are the actual byproducts at the time of application and also when the coating breaks down? To me, it sounds like a neat technology for new installations and expensive retrofits only, not anything that will happen to a running plant.
I'd research these questions tonight, but it's late and I'm keeping the wife awake.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:40PM
Plants do need periodic downtime as a normal part of operation.
(Score: 3, Funny) by soylentsandor on Wednesday September 02 2015, @07:23PM
Which means they need to shut down and drain sections of power plants.
According to TFA, it shouldn't have that much of an impact:
The coating could be added by passing two gasses into the condenser that with the addition of heat would react to form a thin coating within.
That is, if this doesn't turn out to be vapour ware (ha!).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Dr Spin on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:24AM
People stopped making vacuum driven engines a long time before turbines were invented. It is the steam pressure that drives the turbine.
Of course, it may be the article that is a load of tosh, rather than the invention. Of course, a steam engine has a condenser after the
turbine, and it is possible a hydrophilic coating on the condenser might make it more efficient - ie a smaller condenser might do the job.
Ultimately, the condenser is removing the latent heat of evaporation for the steam, and if it does not have the capacity to do that, then
delivering the latent heat faster is not going to help much. If has the capacity, then the coating is not going to deliver much benefit.
It might make smaller condensers feasible, but that would only affect new builds, and probably only marginally.
If steam is condensing IN the turbine, then things are not going too well.
Looks to me like a solution looking for a problem.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday September 02 2015, @03:51PM
Vacuum is a relative term in this case. For a turbine to work, it needs high pressure on one side and low on the other. From the perspective of the high pressure side, the low pressure side is at least a partial vacuum.
The value of this is that it could allow a lower cost capacity expansion in an existing plant and it could reduce the cost of a new plant.
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Wednesday September 02 2015, @08:25PM
Also, you could run the turbine without a condenser, just venting the steam to the atmosphere (away from people, presumably). In this case, normal air pressure would create the suction that pulls steam through the turbine. That would be, of course, much less efficient.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday September 02 2015, @11:45AM
dramatically cut the emissions from power plants by making them far more efficient.
thermal plants already run "pretty close" to theoretical thermodynamic max efficiency. "Dramatically" usually implies order of magnitude or at least doubling and there simply isn't enough gap between thermodynamic law limits and actual production.
Its quoted as system improvement, but its really a non-limiting subsystem improvement. Yes you can now make a steam condenser a wee bit smaller, cheaper, microscopically more efficient, lower pumping losses, etc. That's a very small part of the overall plant. This is interesting military news for nuclear subs, now they can carry an extra missile or more food or WTF because the condenser will be smaller / lighter. Or they'll keep it the same size and turn down all the dials meaning less generated noise, however little a condenser and its pumps make now, it would make microscopically less with this stuff installed.
They do have "sort of" and argument for emissions such that the plant burns such an insane amount of coal that something deep in the decimal places does in fact represent saving an entire train car loaded with coal... every 49999 train cars. Still an entire train car of coal is a big ass pile of coal... that is going to be burned anyway, just a little later or elsewhere... Something tells me the monopoly providers aren't going to pass the savings along to the end users anyway.