Most individuals take boiling water without any consideration. For Associate Professor Matteo Bucci, uncovering the physics behind boiling has been a decade-long journey stuffed with unexpected challenges and latest insights.
The seemingly easy phenomenon is incredibly hard to check in complex systems like nuclear reactors, and yet it sits on the core of a wide selection of essential industrial processes. Unlocking its secrets could thus enable advances in efficient energy production, electronics cooling, water desalination, medical diagnostics, and more.
“Boiling is very important for applications way beyond nuclear,” says Bucci, who earned tenure at MIT in July. “Boiling is utilized in 80 percent of the facility plants that produce electricity. My research has implications for space propulsion, energy storage, electronics, and the increasingly essential task of cooling computers.”
Bucci’s lab has developed latest experimental techniques to make clear a wide selection of boiling and warmth transfer phenomena which have limited energy projects for a long time. Chief amongst those is an issue attributable to bubbles forming so quickly they create a band of vapor across a surface that forestalls further heat transfer. In 2023, Bucci and collaborators developed a unifying principle governing the issue, generally known as the boiling crisis, which could enable more efficient nuclear reactors and forestall catastrophic failures.
For Bucci, each bout of progress brings latest possibilities — and latest inquiries to answer.
“What’s the most effective paper?” Bucci asks. “The very best paper is the subsequent one. I feel Alfred Hitchcock used to say it doesn’t matter how good your last movie was. In case your next one is poor, people won’t remember it. I all the time tell my students that our next paper should all the time be higher than the last. It’s a continuous journey of improvement.”
From engineering to bubbles
The Italian village where Bucci grew up had a population of about 1,000 during his childhood. He gained mechanical skills by working in his father’s machine shop and by taking apart and reassembling appliances like washing machines and air conditioners to see what was inside. He also gained a passion for cycling, competing in the game until he attended the University of Pisa for undergraduate and graduate studies.
In college, Bucci was fascinated with matter and the origins of life, but he also liked constructing things, so when it got here time to choose between physics and engineering, he decided nuclear engineering was middle ground.
“I even have a passion for construction and for understanding how things are made,” Bucci says. “Nuclear engineering was a most unlikely but obvious selection. It was unlikely because in Italy, nuclear was already out of the energy landscape, so there have been only a few of us. At the identical time, there have been a mixture of mental and practical challenges, which is what I like.”
For his PhD, Bucci went to France, where he met his wife, and went on to work at a French national lab. In the future his department head asked him to work on an issue in nuclear reactor safety generally known as transient boiling. To resolve it, he wanted to make use of a technique for making measurements pioneered by MIT Professor Jacopo Buongiorno, so he received grant money to develop into a visiting scientist at MIT in 2013. He’s been studying boiling at MIT ever since.
Today Bucci’s lab is developing latest diagnostic techniques to check boiling and warmth transfer together with latest materials and coatings that might make heat transfer more efficient. The work has given researchers an unprecedented view into the conditions inside a nuclear reactor.
“The diagnostics we’ve developed can collect the equivalent of 20 years of experimental work in a one-day experiment,” Bucci says.
That data, in turn, led Bucci to a remarkably easy model describing the boiling crisis.
“The effectiveness of the boiling process on the surface of nuclear reactor cladding determines the efficiency and the protection of the reactor,” Bucci explains. “It’s like a automotive that you must speed up, but there’s an upper limit. For a nuclear reactor, that upper limit is dictated by boiling heat transfer, so we’re eager about understanding what that upper limit is and the way we are able to overcome it to boost the reactor performance.”
One other particularly impactful area of research for Bucci is two-phase immersion cooling, a process wherein hot server parts bring liquid to boil, then the resulting vapor condenses on a heat exchanger above to create a relentless, passive cycle of cooling.
“It keeps chips cold with minimal waste of energy, significantly reducing the electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of knowledge centers,” Bucci explains. “Data centers emit as much CO2 as the complete aviation industry. By 2040, they may account for over 10 percent of emissions.”
Supporting students
Bucci says working with students is probably the most rewarding a part of his job. “They’ve such great passion and competence. It’s motivating to work with individuals who have the identical passion as you.”
“My students haven’t any fear to explore latest ideas,” Bucci adds. “They almost never stop in front of an obstacle — sometimes to the purpose where you might have to slow them down and put them back heading in the right direction.”
In running the Red Lab within the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Bucci tries to present students independence in addition to support.
“We’re not educating students, we’re educating future researchers,” Bucci says. “I feel a very powerful a part of our work is to not only provide the tools, but additionally to present the boldness and the self-starting attitude to repair problems. That might be business problems, problems with experiments, problems along with your lab mates.”
A few of the more unique experiments Bucci’s students do require them to collect measurements while free falling in an airplane to attain zero gravity.
“Space research is the massive fantasy of all the children,” says Bucci, who joins students within the experiments about twice a 12 months. “It’s very fun and galvanizing research for college students. Zero g gives you a brand new perspective on life.”
Applying AI
Bucci can be enthusiastic about incorporating artificial intelligence into his field. In 2023, he was a co-recipient of a multi-university research initiative (MURI) project in thermal science dedicated solely to machine learning. In a nod to the promise AI holds in his field, Bucci also recently founded a journal called to feature AI-driven research advances.
“Our community doesn’t have a house for those that need to develop machine-learning techniques,” Bucci says. “We desired to create an avenue for people in computer science and thermal science to work together to make progress. I feel we really want to bring computer scientists into our community to hurry this process up.”
Bucci also believes AI might be used to process huge reams of knowledge gathered using the brand new experimental techniques he’s developed in addition to to model phenomena researchers can’t yet study.
“It’s possible that AI will give us the chance to grasp things that can not be observed, or no less than guide us at nighttime as we try to search out the foundation causes of many problems,” Bucci says.
