Water Recovery From Cooling Tower Plumes

Technical Report · Sat Sep 30 04:00:00 EDT 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/2283156· OSTI ID:2283156

Khalil, Karim ^[1]

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1. Infinite Cooling Inc., Malden, MA (United States); Infinite Cooling Inc.

According to studies by the UN and the US State Department, we are on the path to an extreme freshwater shortage by 2030. The US’s largest water withdrawal source is power plants, which account for 39% of total US freshwater withdrawals, mostly for cooling. Cooling towers are the most common cooling system. To solve these problems and enable efficient water- based cooling – Infinite Cooling’s novel technology uses electric fields to ionize the air, charge the escaping water leaving cooling towers and direct the water toward mesh collectors where it collects and gets recycled for use in the cooling system. This technology was developed at MIT and was reduced to practice on a lab-scale prototype, and a prototype at the MIT Cogeneration Power Plant. This DOE award funded taking this technology from a lab-scale prototype to TRL 5 on an operating cooling tower in the field at the MIT Nuclear Research Laboratory. The funding helped to design and optimize an electrostatic plume collection system and test it in high-fidelity lab setting and in actual field conditions on a cooling tower. Throughout the award, Infinite Cooling investigated the formation of plumes on cooling towers, used that information to optimize the design, material and electrical properties of the collection device and quantified the collection yield via flow rate and water quality.

• Research Organization: Infinite Cooling Inc., Malden, MA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM)
• DOE Contract Number: FE0031828
• OSTI ID: 2283156
• Report Number(s): DOE-IC--31828
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS
42 ENGINEERING