SBIR Phase I: Enhanced Water Recovery at the Energy-Water Nexus: Towards Water-Efficient Cooling Systems

这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）项目具有更广泛的影响和商业潜力，它是一项技术，可以为发电厂和工业过程的冷却需求提供大量淡水。美国最大的取水用途之一是发电厂，占美国淡水取水总量的39%，主要用于冷却。冷却塔占电力工业用水量的大部分（每年约1万亿加仑）。该产品通过捕获冷却塔羽流中的水来解决这个问题，这样水就可以重复使用。这使得发电厂（通过再利用）的用水量减少了20%，这意味着发电厂本身节省了大量成本，也为它们所在的社区节省了大量水资源，使这些水可以用于其他重要用途。SBIR第一期项目建议为发电厂和工业过程中使用的冷却塔开发一种商业概念验证水捕获技术。这项新技术利用电场电离冷却塔出口周围的空气，对从冷却塔流出的水进行充电，并将水引导到基于网格的收集器中，在那里它收集并滴向冷却塔外围的收集罐。在整个SBIR的第一阶段，研究将集中在验证冷却塔羽流中可收集水滴的数量，开发耐用的电极和收集器设计，以满足我们的性能和稳定性要求，并分析收集的水质。与初始客户的讨论已经为上述第一阶段研究的每个方面设定了定量的成功度量。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact and commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is technology that can provide a transformational reduction in how much freshwater power plants and industrial processes utilize for their cooling needs. One of the US's largest water withdrawal uses is power plants, which account for 39% of total US freshwater withdrawals, mostly for cooling. Cooling towers account for most of the water consumption of the power industry (~1 trillion gallons per year). The product addresses this problem by capturing water from cooling tower plumes so that the water can be re-used. This enables reduction of consumption of water drawn by the power plant (through re-use) by 20%, which means large cost savings to the plants themselves and large savings of water for the community they operate in, allowing that water to be utilized for other important uses. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to develop a commercial proof-of-concept of water capture technology for cooling towers used in power plants and industrial processes. The novel technology uses electric fields to ionize the air around a cooling tower outlet, charge the escaping water leaving cooling towers and direct the water toward a mesh-based collector, where it collects and drips toward a collection tank on the periphery of the cooling tower. Throughout Phase I of the SBIR, the research will focus on verifying the quantity of collectable water droplets in the plumes of the cooling towers, developing durable electrode and collector designs that meet both our performance and stability requirements, and analyzing the collected water quality. Discussions with initial customers have set quantitative success metrics for each of the aforementioned aspects of the Phase I research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.