A novel heat exchanger including hydrogen and water for heat capturing and combating water scarcity

Abstract

In today's world, people have been facing different unpleasant phenomena like global warming, water shortage and thermal pollution. Power plants for electricity generation are one of the main sources of greenhouse gases and thermal pollution in aquatic ecosystem. On the other hand, these power plants consume high amount of freshwater for cooling purposes. Water scarcity is a detrimental crisis that the whole world is struggling with it. To combat the thermal pollution, various wet cooling and dry cooling technologies have been introduced and reviewed till today. While wet cooling systems use lots of water, dry cooling ones are not suitable options in warm weather and climates. Here, the need for an alternative element is felt more than ever. So far, water and air have been the main coolants in power generation units. According to specific heat capacities in different substances, hydrogen, by far has the highest amount. So, a novel heat exchanger containing hydrogen and water could be a promising solution for the mentioned issues. This paper focuses on advantages of this heat exchanger from different points of view, however, some assumptions, considerations and calculations should be carried out to have the best performance for this idea. Temperature control is such an important process that should be done in heat exchangers. Hence, a review on a control method has been carried out in this paper. The simulation results have been taken by MATLAB/SIMULINK software.