Tag Archives: water repellent

Salt ‘creatures’ could help unclog industrial pipes

I love the video (wish the narrator had a more conversational style rather than the ‘read aloud’ style so many of us adopted in school),

Joel Goldberg’s April 28, 2021 news article (short read) in Science magazine online describes the research (Note: A link has been removed),

Behold the salt monsters. These twisted mineral crystals—formed from the buildup of slightly salty water in power plant pipes—come in many shapes and sizes. But the tiny monsters are a big problem: Each year, they cost the world’s power plants at least $100 billion because workers have to purge the pipes and scrub the crystals from filters.

Now, a solution may be at hand. Engineers can reduce the damage by coating the insides of the pipes with textured, water-repellant [hydrophobic] surfaces …

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Crystal critters: Self-ejection of crystals from heated, superhydrophobic surfaces by Samantha A. McBride, Henri-Louis Girard, and Kripa K. Varanasi. Science Advances 28 Apr 2021: Vol. 7, no. 18, eabe6960 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe6960

This paper is open access. As research papers go, this is quite readable, from the Introduction (Note: Links have been removed),

Many of the uses for water are intimately familiar to us. Drinking water, wash water, water for agriculture, and even water used for recreation have an omnipresent and essential impact on our lives. However, water’s impact and importance extend far beyond these everyday uses. In many developed countries, thermoelectric power production is one of the largest sources of water consumption (1), where it is used to cool reactors and transport heat. In 2015, 41% of all surface water withdrawals in the United States went toward cooling in thermoelectric power plants (2). Thermoelectric power accounts for 90% of all electricity generated within the United States and encompasses many forms of power production, including nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil.

There you go.