Unlocking the Hidden Power of Boiling – For Energy, Space and Later | MIT News

Most people take boiling water for granted. For Associate Professor Matteo Bucci, uncovering the physics behind the boiling has been a decade-long journey full of unexpected challenges and new insights.

A seemingly simple phenomenon is difficult to study in complex systems such as nuclear reactors, but it is at the heart of a wide range of important industrial processes. Therefore, unlocking its secrets can make progress in energy production, electronic cooling, aquatic biochemistry, medical diagnosis, etc.

“Boiling is important for applications beyond nuclear energy,” Bucci said. “Boiling is used in power plants that produce 80% of electricity. My research has implications for space propulsion, energy storage, electronics and increasingly important cooling computer tasks.”

Bucci’s lab has developed new experimental techniques to shed light on various boiling and heat transfer phenomena that have limited energy projects over the decades. The main problem among them is the problem that a bubble formation is so rapid that a vapor is generated on the surface, thus preventing further heat transfer. In 2023, Butch and his collaborators developed a unified principle known as the Crisis of Boiling, which could enable more effective nuclear reactors and prevent catastrophic failures.

For Bucci, every progress brings new possibilities, as well as new questions to be answered.

“What is the best paper?” Butch asked. “The best paper is the next one. I think Alfred Hitchcock once said how good your last movie was. If your next one was poor, people wouldn’t remember it.

From engineering to bubbles

The Italian village where Butch grew up had about 1,000 people in his childhood. He gained mechanical skills by working in his father’s mechanical workshop and disassembling and reassembling such as washing machines and air conditioners to see what’s inside. He also had a passion for cycling and participated in the sport until he went to Pisa University to study for undergraduate and graduate studies.

In college, Bucci was fascinated by the origins of matter and life, but he also liked to build things, so when picking between physics and engineering, he thought nuclear engineering was a good middle ground.

“I have a passion for building and understanding how to make it,” Butch said. “Nuclear engineering is an unlikely but obvious choice. It’s unlikely that in Italy, nuclear engineering has gotten rid of the energy landscape, so few of us have. At the same time, there is a combination of various knowledge and practical challenges at the same time, which is what I like.”

To earn his PhD, Butch went to France, where he met his wife, and then worked in the French National Laboratory. One day, his department head asked him to deal with nuclear reactor safety issues, called short-term boiling. To solve it, he wanted to use a method to make measurements made by MIT professor Jacopo Buongiorno, so he received funding from a grant to become a visiting scientist at MIT in 2013. Since then, he has been learning at MIT.

Today, Bucci’s lab is developing new diagnostic technologies to study boiling and heat transfer as well as new materials and coatings to make heat transfer more efficient. This work has given researchers an unprecedented view of the conditions inside the nuclear reactor.

“The diagnosis we developed can collect the equivalent of 20 years of experimental work in one day experiments,” Bucci said.

In turn, the data leads to a very simple model of Bucci, describing the thrilling crisis.

“The effectiveness of the boiling process on the surface of the nuclear reactor determines the efficiency and safety of the reactor,” Bucci explained. “It’s like the car you’re going to accelerate, but there’s an upper limit. For a nuclear reactor, that upper limit is determined by boiling heat transfer, so we’re interested in understanding what upper limit and how to overcome it to enhance reactor performance.”

Another particularly influential area of ​​research at Bucci is the two-stage immersion cooling, a process in which the thermal server parts boil the liquid and then condense the vapor generated on the heat exchanger above to create a constant, passive cooling cycle.

“It can keep the chips cold and waste minimal energy, which greatly reduces CO2 emissions in the data center,” Bucci explained. “Data centers emit as much CO2 as the entire aviation industry. By 2040, they will account for more than 10% of emissions.”

Support students

Butch said working with students is the most meaningful part of his work. “They have a great passion and ability. It’s motivating to work with someone who has the same passion as you.”

“My students are not afraid to explore new ideas,” Bucci added. “They almost never stop in front of obstacles – sometimes you have to slow down and get them back on track.”

Bucci is in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Red Lab in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, seeks to provide students with independence and support.

“We are not educating students, we are educating future researchers,” Butch said. “I think the most important part of our work is not only providing tools, but also giving confidence in solving problems and a self-starting attitude. It can be a business problem, an experimental problem, a lab partner problem.”

Some of the more unique experiments Bucci students did ask them to collect measurements while freely falling into the plane to reach zero gravity.

“Space research is a huge fantasy for all children,” Butch said, who participates in experiments about twice a year. “It’s very interesting and inspiring research for students. Zero G gives you a new perspective on life.”

Apply AI

Bucci is also excited about incorporating artificial intelligence into his field. In 2023, he is a co-profile of the Thermal Science Multiple University Research Program (MURI) project dedicated to machine learning. To pay tribute to AI’s promises in his field, Bucci also recently created a diary called AI thermal fluids Features AI-driven research progress.

“Our community doesn’t have a home for people who want to develop machine learning,” Bucci said. “We want to build a pathway for people in computer science and thermal science to work together. I think we really need to bring computer scientists into our community to speed up the process.”

Bucci also believes that AI can be used to process large amounts of data collected using new experimental techniques he developed and simulate phenomena that researchers cannot study.

“AI may give us the opportunity to understand things that cannot be observed, or at least we may guide us in the dark as we try to find the root cause of many problems,” Bucci said.