New surface treatment stops scale buildup
You’ve probably seen it in your kitchen cookware, or inside old plumbing pipes: scaly deposits left over time by hard, mineral-laden water. It happens not only in pipes and cooking pots in the home, but also in pipelines and valves that deliver oil and gas, and pipes that carry cooling water inside power plants.Scale, as these deposits are known, causes inefficiencies, downtime, and maintenance issues. In the oil and gas industry, scale has sometimes led to the complete shutdown, at least temporarily, of operating wells. So addressing this problem could have a big payoff.Now a team of researchers at MIT has come up with a potential solution to this huge but little-recognized problem. A new kind of surface treatment — involving nanoscale texturing of the surface, which is then coated with a lubricating liquid — can reduce the rate of scale formation at least tenfold, they have found. The findings...