Saturday, May 30, 2015

Thin Coating on Condensers Could Make Power Plants More Efficient

Graphene layer one atom thick could quadruple rate of condensation heat transfer in generating plants.

An uncoated copper condenser tube (top left) is shown next to a similar tube coated with graphene (top right). When exposed to water vapor at 100 degrees Celsius, the uncoated tube produces an inefficient water film (bottom left), while the coated shows the more desirable dropwise condensation (bottom right). (Credit: Courtesy of the researchers) Click to Enlarge.
Most of the world’s electricity-producing power plants — whether powered by coal, natural gas, or nuclear fission — make electricity by generating steam that turns a turbine.  That steam then is condensed back to water, and the cycle begins again.

But the condensers that collect the steam are quite inefficient, and improving them could make a big difference in overall power plant efficiency.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT has developed a way of coating these condenser surfaces with a layer of graphene, just one atom thick, and found that this can improve the rate of heat transfer by a factor of four — and potentially even more than that, with further work.  And unlike polymer coatings, the graphene coatings have proven to be highly durable in laboratory tests.

Read more at Thin Coating on Condensers Could Make Power Plants More Efficient

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