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

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.