According to foreign media New Atlas, about 39% of the water extracted from American rivers, lakes and reservoirs is used to cool power plants. In turn, most of the water is discharged as steam from the cooling towers of these power plants. A new system developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) converts steam into clean drinking water.
Developed by a team led by Dr. Maher Damak and associate professor Kripa Varanasi, the system is a variant of existing fogging technology that involves the use of finely suspended fine mesh to capture water droplets in their moist air. The droplets then drop the mesh and collect in the trough at the bottom. One of the problems with these nets is that the air naturally tends to flow around the objects in its path - for example the lines that make up the mesh - allowing the droplets to pass between these lines The gap. Therefore, most fog nets can only capture about 1% to 3% of water droplets passing through them.
In the new MIT system, the net is replaced by a window-like screen device (still containing a wire mesh), a beam of ions passing through the moist air, which causes the water droplets in the air to be charged. If applied to a power plant cooling tower The system (which requires very little power) will collect the distilled water, which means it can be used as drinking water. That is, water can also be reused at the factory, saving operators money.
In addition, in coastal power plants that use seawater cooling, this technology can replace traditional desalination technology. Scientists believe that the cost of adding the system to an existing power plant will be about one-third that of an independent desalination plant. The cost will be about 1/50. In fact, Varanasi estimates, 'this may offset the need for about 70% of new desalination plants in the next decade.'
Researchers now plan to install a comprehensive system test version on the cooling tower of the MIT Central Utility Plant. Researchers believe that if integrated into a typical 600 megawatt power plant, the technology can collect 567.8 million liters of water per year, which is currently 20% to 30% of water lost in the form of steam.
The system was described in a paper published in the journal Science Progress on Friday.
