Development of MHD power generators

The first recorded MHD investigation was conducted in 1821 by the English chemist Humphry Davy when he showed that an arc could be deflected by a magnetic field. More than a decade later, Michael Faraday sought to demonstrate motional electromagnetic induction in a conductor moving through Earth’s geomagnetic field. To this end, he set up in January 1832 a rudimentary open-circuit MHD generator, or flow meter, on the Waterloo Bridge across the River Thames in London. His experiment was unsuccessful owing to the electrodes being electrochemically polarized, an effect not understood at that time.

Faraday soon turned his attention to other aspects of electromagnetic induction, and MHD power generation received little attention until the 1920s and ’30s, when Bela Karlovitz, a Hungarian-born engineer, first proposed a gaseous MHD system. In 1938 he and Hungarian engineer D. Halász set up an experimental MHD facility at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation research laboratories and by 1946 had shown that, through seeding the working gas, small amounts of electric power could be extracted. The project was abandoned, however, largely because of a lack of understanding of the conditions required to make the working gas an effective conductor.

Interest in magnetohydrodynamics grew rapidly during the late 1950s as a result of extensive studies of ionized gases for a number of applications. In 1959 the American engineer Richard J. Rosa operated the first truly successful MHD generator, producing about 10 kilowatts of electric power. By 1963 the Avco Research Laboratory, under the direction of the American physicist Arthur R. Kantrowitz, had constructed and operated a 33-megawatt MHD generator, and for many years this remained a record power output. The assumption in the late 1960s that nuclear power would dominate commercial power generation, and the failure to find applications for space missions, led to a sharp curtailment of MHD research. The energy crisis of the 1970s, however, brought about a revival of interest, with the focus centred on coal-fueled systems. By the late 1980s, development had reached the point where construction of a complete demonstration system was feasible. However, the performance and economic risks have deterred electric power utilities from making deep investments in such systems. This situation may change if energy prices or environmental considerations shift significantly.