Stony Brook Receives $2.5 Million DOE Grant to Develop Transformational Energy Technology

August 17, 2015

Assembled at Stony Brook's Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center are ARPA-E awardees, from left: Rebecca Trojanowski, Brookhaven National Laboratory; Professor William Worek, Stony Brook University; Professor Jon Longtin, Stony Brook University; Dr.Tom Butcher, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Professor Ya Wang, Stony Brook University.

A research team from Stony Brook University and Brookhaven Lab has been awarded a $2.5 million U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) Grant to develop a system that condenses water vapor from power plants in order to provide supplemental cooling for the plant and reduce water use. The team, led by Professor Jon Longtin of Stony Brook, will work to condense water out of flue gas to provide additional cooling that may enable power plants to be built in dry and land-locked areas not located near a large body of water, at a time when using open bodies of water for cooling has become a national and global concern.

The grant will help to bring scientists at Stony Brook and Brookhaven Lab together with industry partners to create prototype energy systems to be incorporated into 21st century cleaner energy practices. The research team will use a high-performance thermosyphon to move heat from the flue gas with no additional refrigeration required. The thermosyphon uses the latent heat of vaporization – rather than a temperature gradient – for heat transfer. As such the thermal resistance for heat transfer can be substantially reduced. The condensate is then stored and used for subsequent evaporative cooling using commercially available technologies.
 
Brookhaven research staff will play an integral role in the project, which will include hosting the planned prototype demonstration. “We are thrilled to have the chance to be part of the Stony Brook team on this high-impact project,” said Brookhaven project leader Tom Butcher. “This work gives us the opportunity to advance several important thermal-fluid problems including loop-heat pipes and composite material heat transfer.”

To learn more about this research visit: www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=11741

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