A Knoxville-based vibration technology company could soon save TVA millions
Dr. Ayyoub Momen develops new methods for commercial and industrial drying. Instead of using heat, which consumes a lot of energy, Ultasonic Technology Solutions uses vibration technology to remove water as a cold mist.
The Ultrasonic Technology Solutions (UTS) team is exploring another use of this fast-vibration technology. It will put its innovation front and center in one of the biggest energy hubs in the nation.
The nation’s largest public power utility, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), has partnered with UTS. They are piloting its mechanical vibration technology as a deicing solution for power plants.
Curt Jawdy, the Senior Manager of Research & Development at TVA, noted that “TVA is always looking to deploy technologies in new ways to solve problems. In this case, we were evaluating UTS as a drying technology. We were pleased to see that it was excellent at breaking up ice, indicating the potential to solve a longstanding cost driver in our nuclear fleet.”
The integration of vibration, ice, and power plants
Four of TVA’s nuclear units use an ice condenser containment system, which means the reactors are surrounded by thousands of canisters filled with ice.
It’s a safety feature. In the extremely rare case of a main steam line break, high-pressure steam would flow through these ice beds. There it would instantly condense back into water. This rapid cooling would help lower pressure and temperature inside the containment building. Thus, protecting the reactor structure.
To keep the system reliable, the ice must be inspected and weighed during scheduled maintenance shutdowns. This routine maintenance can often turn into a time-consuming, resource-draining dilemma. This occurs especially when ice clumps together and freezes to the structure, making the baskets difficult to remove.
Right now, specialized TVA teams must use slow heating processes to mitigate the issue, at the cost of creating more frozen baskets once the water re-freezes. But UTS has a faster way.
Their approach uses carefully tuned micro-vibrations to break the ice instantly, without applying heat. And, the best part – it is designed to be two to three times faster than current methods.
“It’s a daunting task to build a tool to fit into this space,” Connor Shelander, the UTS’s Senior Design Engineer, said during the design approval meeting. “That’s why we’ve installed cameras to let the operator see inside, as the vibration breaks up the ice.”
Additionally, the UTS-designed process minimizes vapor and re-freezing, cuts down the time maintenance crews must spend in freezing environments, and could end up saving TVA millions of dollars every single year.
How? By using UTS’ micro-vibrations, ice can be broken apart almost instantaneously. This provides significant time savings and minimizes impacts to outage duration.
Ultrasonic Technology Solution’s Innovations
The novel technology builds on years of research. This dates back to Momen’s time as Program Manager for the HVAC, Appliances, and Water Heating program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He left the lab in 2020 to transfer his technology to the commercial sector.
UTS matured its vibrational deicing technology under an R&D grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Technologies Office, through the project titled “Higher Efficiency, Demand-Flexible Refrigerator with On-Demand Micro-Vibrational Deicing Technology.”
The use cases for the vibration technology keep growing from drying to deicing.
“This technology has a lot of applications. We applied the drying technology to the ceiling tile industry, with textiles, and with carpets. Then, we applied this technology to dry human solid waste for the International Space Station. Additionally, we are making the world’s first combo clothes washer and dryer for space applications,” said UTS Founder, Ayyoub Momen. “More recently, we applied our vibrational technology to do the defrosting in refrigeration cycles, which led to the partnership with TVA.”
The pilot testing for this project is expected to begin in October 2025.
Read dozens of stories about Ayyoub Momen in Teknovation.
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