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

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to save significant amounts of water at power plants and other industrial facilities, potentially saving hundreds of billions of gallons of water every year in the US. This will help reduce the water footprint of power generation and other cooling applications, reduce operating expenses for these facilities, and increase the reliability of power generation. The annual savings can be several millions of dollars per facility and the market opportunity in the US is estimated at around $4 B. Furthermore, this technology can be used for upcycling the captured water from cooling towers that use wastewater or seawater, potentially producing pure distilled water for commercial and domestic use. This SBIR Phase II project proposes to advance a water capture technology for cooling tower plumes. The proposed technology uses electric fields to ionize the air around a cooling tower outlet, charge the water escaping cooling towers, and direct it toward a mesh-based collector and ultimately a collection tank on the periphery of the cooling tower. The Phase II proposal includes both systematic experimental studies to optimize the collection setup for real-world deployment, as well as material choice and durability studies. This project will optimize the design and build a pilot system, including a control panel designed for compatibility with existing systems. Data collected from the pilot installation on collection efficiency, water quality, and power consumption will be used to iterate and improve the design. 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.