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An innovative microstructure design distributes water to rapidly cool a hot surface without interference from the steam that is created in the process. This approach could enable safer and more efficient power generation.
A few droplets of water sprinkled on a hot frying pan will quickly boil away. Yet the same droplets on a much hotter pan will instead remain intact by floating on their own insulating vapour — a phenomenon referred to as the Leidenfrost effect1. Eye-catching though it might be, this behaviour can have dire consequences in applications that require intense water cooling, including nuclear power plants, in which inefficient cooling due to the Leidenfrost effect can lead to nuclear meltdown. Writing in Nature, Jiang et al.2 report a surface design capable of inhibiting this effect, to allow spray cooling at temperatures exceeding 1,100 °C, which is 600 °C higher than alternative strategies have achieved.