Cooling when there’s too much heat

MIT researchers make surfaces that are easier to cool under extreme heat; finding could benefit power plants, electronics. When an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, knocking out emergency power supplies, crews sprayed seawater on the reactors to cool them - to no avail. One possible reason: Droplets can't land on surfaces that hot. Instead, they instantly begin to evaporate, forming a thin layer of vapor and then bouncing along it - just as they would in a hot cooking pan. Now, MIT researchers have come up with a way to cool hot surfaces more effectively by keeping droplets from bouncing. Their solution: Decorate the surface with tiny structures and then coat it with particles about 100 times smaller. Using that approach, they produced textured surfaces that could be heated to temperatures at least 100 degrees Celsius higher than smooth ones before droplets bounced.