Making droplets drop faster

New nanopatterned surfaces could improve the efficiency of powerplants and desalination systems.
David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

The condensation of water is crucial to the operation of most of the powerplants that provide our electricity — whether they are fueled by coal, natural gas or nuclear fuel. It is also the key to producing potable water from salty or brackish water. But there are still large gaps in the scientific understanding of exactly how water condenses on the surfaces used to turn steam back into water in a powerplant, or to condense water in an evaporation-based desalination plant.

New research by a team at MIT offers important new insights into how these droplets form, and ways to pattern the collecting surfaces at the nanoscale to encourage droplets to form more rapidly. These insights could enable a new generation of significantly more efficient powerplants and desalination plants, the researchers say.




The new results were published online this month in the journal ACS Nano, a publication of the American Chemical Society, in a paper by MIT mechanical engineering graduate student Nenad Miljkovic, postdoc Ryan Enright and associate professor Evelyn Wang. More


A novel way to concentrate sun’s heat


MIT researchers find a way to generate power without the usual mirror arrays.
David L. Chandler, MIT News Office



Most technologies for harnessing the sun’s energy capture the light itself, which is turned into electricity using photovoltaic materials. Others use the sun’s thermal energy, usually concentrating the sunlight with mirrors to generate enough heat to boil water and turn a generating turbine. A third, less common approach is to use the sun’s heat — also concentrated by mirrors — to generate electricity directly, using solid-state devices called thermophotovoltaics, which have their roots at MIT dating back to the 1950s.

Now, researchers at MIT have found a way to use thermophotovoltaic devices without mirrors to concentrate the sunlight, potentially making the system much simpler and less expensive. More

Click the link below to view Dr. Gang Chen's recent presentation titled "Solar Energy the Third Way" for WGBH.

View Video

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