DailyDirt: Watched Pots Do Boil

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

People often joke about how bad they are at cooking that they can't even boil water, but the process of boiling water is actually so ubiquitous and important that figuring out how to do it more efficiently is a significant challenge. We've mentioned some materials and designs that can help speed up the boiling process before, so here are a couple more cool ways to vaporize liquids.

• More efficient fractional distillation can separate alcohol from water using nanoparticles. Dissolved nanoparticles of gold-silica can absorb light and heat up just the surface of a liquid, allowing the more volatile alcohol to vaporize (and avoiding an azeotropic mixture). [url]
• Taking advantage of the Leidenfrost effect, steel balls coated with a super-hydrophobic coating can be heated to 400°C and plunged into room temperature water without producing violent boiling bubbles. This discovery could help improve various heat-transfer techniques and make some large industrial processes much safer. [url]
• Producing steam using solar energy can be done very quickly using nanoparticles, too. Heating up water to its boiling point is useful for a lot of applications (eg. producing electricity, purifying water, etc), so any tricks to make the process more efficient could have a significant impact on energy usage. [url]

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Filed Under: azeotrope, boiling, distillation, energy, heat transfer, leidenfrost effect, nanotech, nanotechnology, purification, solar energy, water

DailyDirt: Boiling Water More Efficiently

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Boiling water might sound like a common and easy thing to do, but precisely because it's such a ubiquitous activity, if we can make it more efficient, we can save a sizable amount of energy. Maybe you've tried not watching a kettle to see if it boils faster, but far more serious efforts are making progress on more efficient boiling. Cookware isn't the only application that could benefit from more efficient thermal transfer. Check out these examples of making hot water using less energy.

• The "Flare Pan" is a pot design that claims to heat up faster and use 40% less energy than conventional cookware. The bottom of this pot has fins to help distribute heat, making it heat up more quickly and efficiently -- and only being slightly more difficult to clean. [url]
• A copper surface covered in copper nanorods can increase the energy efficiency of bringing water to a boil by an order of magnitude. The nanoscale and microscale textures encourage nanobubbles and jump-start the boiling process. [url]
• Nanostructures made from metal-coated viruses create the right textures on a surface to boil water three times faster. This kind of surface probably won't be sold in cookware, but it could make power plants more efficient in the future. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: boiling, cookware, energy, flare pan, heat transfer, nanorods, nanotech, nanotechnology, phase change, water