Industrial cooling is one of the largest uses of water in the world, especially in cooling towers, which consume over 2 trillion gallons of water per year in the US alone. This is a major sustainability issue as water is becoming scarcer and it is a major cost for plants to acquire and treat water. At Infinite Cooling we have an MIT-developed, patented technology that uses electric fields to recover water from the evaporative losses of cooling towers so that the same water can be re-used again and again. Our product has already been deployed in two full-scale pilots and on a large-scale power plant. Our technology uses electric fields to capture water plumes that are leaving cooling towers in an efficient way. We have invented a patented system that can generate ions that electrically charge the escaping water and attract it toward a collector mesh placed on top of the cooling tower. The product uses little power, has no moving parts and does not affect the plant operations. It captures the totality of the plume, providing plume abatement as well as water savings, chemical treatment reduction and help on meeting sustainability goals.
The equipment is complemented by proprietary software to optimally control the cooling tower to minimize energy and water usage. It also allows real-time monitoring of the cooling tower and rapid detection of issues or tower performance deterioration to minimize energy usage and provide adequate water temperature to the process. Optimization and monitoring are based on using advanced physics modeling, coupled with machine learning algorithms that translate sensor data into actionable insights.
