The Technology
The Open
Oscillatory Approach
Hydram Research's engineers have discovered and developed a new and more efficient way to boil water and generate industrial steam.
The elegant open oscillatory approach is a departure from the method we're all accustomed to, attacking the liquid with heat until it bubbles - how we've boiled water since we lived in caves.
In simple terms, our novel boiling method can be described as exciting and maintaining oscillations of a warm multi-ton liquid piston so that it shoots several meters up and down a thick pipe.
The process consists of three stages:
1
Flash Evaporation
Low pressure steam forms in the wake of the falling liquid piston, which drops due to its weight and pressure conditions in the wider side tank.
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2
Compression by Liquid Piston
After dropping several meters the liquid piston naturally rushes back up, rapidly squishing the steam.
The trick is not to allow the steam to condense back to droplets, but to let the piston pressurize and heat it up - similar to air in a diesel engine.
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3
Ejection
As the liquid piston approaches the top again, the steam's pressure forces a valve to open and the steam is ejected into the steam header to do useful work - like district heating, cooking food, or creating paper.
↺ Whole process takes ~2–3 seconds then repeats
Q: Wait, that sounds awfully complex - why don't you just heat the water?
A: One of the advantages of doing it this way is that most of the steam's energy is derived from a process called "evaporative cooling".
This means the main energy source is the tremendous amount of thermal energy required to keep the system from cooling down. That's what the (free) waste-heat is used for. Swinging the water back and forth however requires remarkably little energy (and that's the energy you have to pay for).
