Controlling Bubbles In Boiling Water Could Make Power Plants More Efficient

The act of boiling water helps us brew coffee and cook pasta — and it’s also what fuels most of the world’s energy sources. But boiling is really all about the bubbles, and until now their formation had been seen as random and haphazard. MIT engineers say they can now control the formation of bubbles, which might change the way power is generated.

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CrazyNeutrino said:

Controlling Bubbles In Boiling Water Could Make Power Plants More Efficient

The act of boiling water helps us brew coffee and cook pasta — and it’s also what fuels most of the world’s energy sources. But boiling is really all about the bubbles, and until now their formation had been seen as random and haphazard. MIT engineers say they can now control the formation of bubbles, which might change the way power is generated.

more…

MIT engineers are probably aghast that the MIT marketing department picked up on this.

> MIT engineers say they can now control the formation of bubbles

A colleague of mine at CSIRO was working on this. Bubbles in ice-cream and bubbles in Cheetos-like products were two of his.

His primary contribution was that whenever bubbles form they ring like a bell. This sound is picked up by a microphone, and the characteristic frequencies of the observed sound tell you exactly what the the size distribution of the bubbles is.

> Surfactant molecules can be electrically charged but they also have the ability to be both hydrophobic (repelled by water) and hydrophilic (attracted to water).

There are at least four fundamentally different types of surfactant molecules: anionic, cationic, non-ionic and zwitterionic/amphoteric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfactant#Classification_of_surfactants