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2. Marine Cloud Brightening

Experimental Investigation into Superheated Atomisation for Marine Cloud Brightening

Edmund Reardon

No existing spray applications meet the requirements for Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) and only a handful of groups globally are working to develop any. We are a team of engineers in Cambridge developing four different spray techniques. After researching the potential of several candidate sprayers, superheated atomisation was arrived at. A superheated sprayer and particle detection experiment have been constructed with which size distributions have been generated displaying 77% of the particles in the correct size range for MCB. These results are soon to be submitted for publication and similar findings are made by only one other author in the literature. They are important for atomisation in general. Energy requirements are currently comparable to sprayers used in current MCB field trials. Large quantities of submicron size distribution data, unseen in the literature, have been compiled to show corelations between temperature or pressure and energy efficiency. Nozzle geometry effects on geometric standard deviation of the size distributions have been shown. A world class detection setup is being used to improve understanding of these corelations and other variables with the aim of developing a sprayer with sustainable energy requirements that could be feasibly run on renewables. This work will determine if this sprayer offers potential for scaling up for wider use. Final testing underway will facilitate the design of a scaled up superheated sprayer proposed for outdoor testing. This is a key step towards field trials that will eventually test efficacy of MCB and clarify required spray rates and droplet size.

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Arctic Repair Conference, hosted by Centre for Climate Repair with UArctic.

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