MIT scientists found a way to boil water more quickly and efficiently | Hacker News Reader

MIT scientists found a way to boil water more quickly and efficiently

interestingengineering.com

TLDR: cutting a zillion microcavities in the (inside) bottom of a metal pot improves the heat transfer from the metal to the water & steam. Which means you don't need the bottom of the pot (or outside of the boiler tube, or etc.) to be quite as hot, for a given steam output.

In thermodynamics theory, or on an industrial scale, this improves the efficiency.

If you're just cooking spaghetti, or dreaming of perpetual motion machines - "sorry, move on".

So thinning out the bottom of the pot with a metal drill bit won't work? Why not?

The whole point of using metal for pots is that they're quite high heat conduction, which should limit any gains there. So I suspect you could get a _small_ improvement by thinning, but I doubt it'd even be noticable.

It'd be a mix of reducing the mass to be heated and increasing the heat conduction, both very small effects.

Because the goal of boiling water for most cooking is to heat the water to the boiling point and not to make steam.

You also have to deal with cleaning a pan with micro cavities.

Well it could work for kitchenware if you're living on boiled distilled water...

I think the idea of the pits is to increase the surface area contacting the water and heating it.

But you could make small pits on the bottom of a pot with a metal drill bit, couldn't you? And this would increase the surface area contacting the water and heating it, right?

They're not really pits, they're microscopic tubes that stick up from the surface. The point of them is to act like a chimney for steam to rise from instead of sticking to the surface of the pan where they insulate the water from the pan itself. That said, they also probably add surface area just from being a bunch of tubes sticking up into the water.

I still support you in your endeavors of dimpling cookware. There are worse ways to kill a few hours than doing science in the kitchen.

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