Hydrophobic graphene coating could make power plants more efficient

Product Design & Development reports that a team of researchers at MIT has developed a way of coating 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.

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). Picture from www.pddnet.com - Courtesy of the researchers

The findings are reported in the journal Nano Letters by MIT graduate student Daniel Preston, professors Evelyn Wang and Jing Kong, and two others. The improvement in condenser heat transfer, which is just one step in the power-production cycle, could lead to an overall improvement in power plant efficiency of 2 to 3 percent based on figures from the Electric Power Research Institute, Preston says — enough to make a significant dent in global carbon emissions, since such plants represent the vast majority of the world’s electricity generation. “That translates into millions of dollars per power plant per year,” he explains.

Extremely thin hydrophobic coating is also obviously an open field for clever ALD solutions. Here is a recent report on conventional hydrophobic coating technologies from Vanderbilt University taking a    closer look at the US market.

The history of hydrophobic coating technologies