Reusing Pure Water Now Possible With MIT Steam Collector

Aug, 2021 - By WMR

MIT technicians invented a different steam collector to collect and reuse waste water vapor from the refrigeration towers of the power plant.

Fossil fuel and nuclear power plants use millions of gallons of water for refrigeration, which is then wasted as water vapor. Engineers at MIT have now designed a system to collect and reuse that wasted water. Humongous clouds of white steam are very popular, mostly around power plants, although it’s very comforting to know that they are not greenhouse gas emissions or carbon dioxide emissions, they can display the quantity of water that is being utilized. MIT technicians in the past years have designed a system for harvesting and collecting water vapor as purely distilled water. This could then be recycled into the facility’s other water using devices such as heating or cooling.

Conventional experiments for extracting water from mist or vapor have relied on components with large surface areas to which water particles can attach. The MIT equipment does this as well, but in a more effective manner. The vapors are first vaporized with an ion beam for a powered charging and are then passed through a wire filter with the opposite charging. This implies that the crystals are particularly drawn to the mesh, where they congregate and drop into a container that is placed below it for the compilation. Following a number of clinical trials that demonstrated the design’s viability, the team put the framework through its paces in two of MIT’s research power station infrastructures, one of which was fueled by nuclear energy and the other one by natural gas.

The clouds of smoke almost vanished in both instances, and the collected water was highly pure. This water was 60x purer than what ordinarily passes into a power station’s refrigeration system and about 10x purer than normal drinkable water. The setup could perhaps be able to decrease water usage by up to 20% in bigger facilities where this collected water is recycled directly, says the group. As this recycled water has high purity, it could be pumped back into the public water system.