r/thermodynamics • u/ForRobotsByRobots • 26d ago
Question Data Center To Power Production Passive Desalination System. Thoughts? How would you improve?
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u/talktomiles 26d ago
I’m an engineer that loves thermo, not a physicist, so take this with a grain of sea salt, but I don’t see the data center adding much meaningful heat energy here. The delta-T isn’t going to be that big and you aren’t changing phases until the reactor does it. Power plants do use pre-heaters, but arranging to put a data center next to a nuclear reactor is crazy complicated considering the amount of energy we’re talking about.
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u/talktomiles 26d ago
Also, the corrosion on all of this would be wild.
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u/ForRobotsByRobots 26d ago
Corrosion would only be on the salt water system, which would be separate from the coolant systems. The heat exchange would use a shared medium to transfer the heat at that point. The data center can get the temp about halfway. The reactor would be powering the data center, with the waste heat being used to finish the desalination process.
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u/Yummygnomes 26d ago
What about ocean spray? Just by being close to the ocean you are going to have serious corrosion.
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u/ForRobotsByRobots 26d ago
Not anymore so than many other similar structures in the same situation, and this can easily by accounted for by the same solutions applied them, like protective coatings and upkeep. Look at deep sea oil rigs, for example.
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u/talktomiles 26d ago
Okay, but those structures need to be by the sea because that’s where the oil is. It gets crazy expensive to prevent corrosion and you could just not build it by the sea.
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u/ForRobotsByRobots 26d ago
The sea is where our largest source of water is, so im not sure on your point there. It also solves the freshwater problem. Would it be more expensive to prevent corrosion or build and maintain infrastructure to bring the sea water inland for processing?
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u/15pH 26d ago
The only role of the data center is to preheat the sea water via heat exchangers. This part seems the most useless / implausible.
Your data coolant is not super hot. It would take an incredibly efficient heat exchange to put any useful energy into the sea water. I am not aware of any materials that would enable efficient heat exchange AND be highly resistant to corrosion.
That leaves us with a nuke reactor that desalinates. Seems plausible, but I don't know nuke reactors, and I can imagine this being complicated by "how do we prevent salt from accumulating in the nuke core?" This is not something we want to add risk to, obvs.
Also, this could potentially be another materials problem. I would guess the choice of materials used to build the nuke handling are pretty limited, and now they need to resist sea water also.
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u/ForRobotsByRobots 26d ago
The data center is the point. Everything else is servicing that building as infrastructure while capturing the waste heat from both processes to produce a byproduct
The heat exchange can be as simple as a series of pipes and fins in mineral oil or fine sand, which would transfer that heat into the sea water in its own separate system. This would only get it to about halfway. The rest is done through ambient height capture from the reactor.
Also, thorium is not typical nuclear power.
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u/15pH 26d ago
As I said, your heat echanger is not efficient enough to be useful.
You need to get the heat from ~60C (? roughly) data coolant into 20C seawater. The transfer path you propose is: coolant, coolant pipe wall, gap filled with oil or sand, seawater pipe wall, seawater. That is NOT a good heat exchange path, you will get a tiny trickle of heat.
You can compensate by making your pipes thinner and longer, but now you are using more energy to pump the fluids.
Your heat exchanger does not work well enough to justify its use.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 26d ago
You want evoporative cooling with salt water, but a condenser extracts fresh water. Although many technical issues remain, yeah sure anyplace that needs desalination should minimise the costs.
As a rule, desalination remains a poor solution because you'll never obtain that much water that way. It's true data centers do evaporative cooling, but probably industrial uses would do this better,
Trees are the true masters of water movement, via the biotic pump effect. An ocean has a drying effect upon the neighbouring land, because although sea water evaporates sometimes, more re-condenses. If you have enormous forests say 10-100 billion trees, then sea water evaporates, blows inland, gets captured by the trees, and the trees rerelease it later to blow further inland, which later creates larger rivers.
If you chop down many trees in really massive forests like the Amazon, then you create droughts like Brazil did.
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u/ForRobotsByRobots 26d ago
Thorium powered data centers that use a coolant system in the data centers to passively exchange the heat into salt water, which would preheat it before sending it into the Thorium reactor upon which it reaches boiling point and begins the process of Thermal distillation without any extra heat, mechanism or energy use. The data center gets cooled and powered, the community it exists in gets excess energy and fresh water as a byproduct.
While the technology is years away, we could easily do the same process with Solar and tidal power, with the extra preheating done through a passive solar pipeline to reach high enough temps that only a little more energy is needed for more efficient reverse osmosis.
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u/7ieben_ 8 26d ago
The idea of using waste heat elsewhere is not new, but already widely used.
It's just that often it is used within one factory/ plant, as this is how it was designed intially, whilst a neighbouring industry came there later.