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Enhancing Dry Cooling in Power Plants through High-Conductivity Thermal Ground Planes

JSHS · 2024

Kelly Yang, Dr. Yung-Cheng Lee, Dr. Paul Strode · Fairview High School, Boulder, CO

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Overview

As global electricity demand increases, the majority of power is produced by thermoelectric plants using fossil and nuclear fuels, despite the rising role of renewables like solar and wind. These plants typically dissipate about 60% of generated heat, often through water cooling, which poses sustainability issues due to significant water usage. With ongoing water shortages, there's a shift towards alternative dry cooling methods that use air, but these methods face efficiency challenges due to air's lower t hermal properties. This study introduces high thermal conductivity thermal ground planes (TGPs) as fins in dry cooling systems to overcome these challenges. TGPs, encapsulating a phase -change material, exhibit thermal conductivities tens to hundreds of tim es higher than metals, leading to rapid heat dissipation. My experimental results show TGPs achieving effective thermal conductivities up to 30,000 W/mK, significantly outperforming traditional aluminum fins. Simulating TGPs in a 600 MW power plant's dry c ooling system indicated a 2.5°Creduction in turbine discharge temperature, a 0.8% efficiency increase, 1% lower coal consumption, and fuel cost savings of approximately $500,000 annually for the power plant. This approach not only reduces water dependency , but also enhances dry cooling efficiency and operational costs in power plants.

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Competition history

  • JSHS 2024 Category not listed

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Source: Junior Science and Humanities Symposium

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