The formation of droplets that carry an electric charge could improve efficiency at power plants the Massachusetts Institute of Technology News reported.
"We found that when these droplets jump, through analysis of high-speed video, we saw that they repel one another midflight," Nenad Miljkovic, a post doctorate student working on the new find told MIT news. "Previous studies have shown no such effect. When we first saw that, we were intrigued." Miljkovic also helped mechanical engineering professor Evelyn Wang, and two others.
Researchers found that tiny water droplets, which form on a superhydrophobic surface and then "jump" away are electrically powered and could lead to a new way of drawing power from the atmosphere.
"Now we can use an external electric field to mitigate any tendency of the droplets to return to the condenser, and enhance the heat transfer," Miljkovic told MIT News.
The researchers discovery, which can be found in Miljkovic's journal Nature Communications, was part of previous work the team did. This showed how droplets can leap away from a surface by themselves in certain conditions, rather than just going down and separating from the area because of gravity pulls.
This is especially true when the droplets condense onto a metal surface with a "superhydrophobic coating" and combine themselves with two other droplets. This allows the droplets to spontaneously jump from the surface because of the excess energy the surface gives off.
"The fact that the jumping droplets exhibit a net charge was completely unknown until this report," Jonathan Boreyko, a post doctorate student at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn, told the News. "It is my impression that this work is of very high quality and will have a large impact on the rapidly evolving field of phase-change heat transfer on nanostructured surfaces."
WATCH:
