Trustee professor honored for finding alternative engery source in salt ponds
This article is the last in a series of three profiling the work of this year’s trustee professors at Utah State University.
Clair Batty, head of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, a self-proclaimed “Jack-of-all-trades and master of none,” has worn many hats at Utah State University. His career research and commitment to USU recently earned him the title of trustee professor.
The Utah native and Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate began his career with a dissertation on aerospace engineering in ballistic missiles and their burn rates while entering the atmosphere.
Starting at USU, Batty said he began with what he thought was important – research in irrigated agriculture – and pumped water while eschewing the fledgling space research at USU.
Batty’s research has included salt gradient solar ponds, which could be important as an alternative energy source in Utah with the Great Salt Lake being nearby. Batty said in a salt gradient solar pond, energy could be harnessed because while the surfaces of these ponds are frozen, the floors are boiling and releasing energy.
“We know how to get as much energy out of the resources at the Great Salt Lake as you’d get by burning 100 million tons of coal a year,” Batty said.
Batty said in the last few years, he feels his career has come full circle. From a doctoral dissertation in aerospace engineering to working on the cryogenic cooling system in telescope satellites for ballistic defense, Batty and his staff are responsible for the cooling of precision instruments in space.
Batty said it is important for the instruments in the telescope satellites to be cooled to 7 to 8 degrees Kelvin, or just above absolute freezing, because the instruments themselves are radiating energy, which can throw off the detection value of the telescope.
“It’s just a very sensitive telescope,” Batty said. “If you were to throw an object the size of a plate or a basketball, a room temperature object of that size out in the dark night sky, we could see it from here to England.”
Batty also said a smaller satellite he worked on could see a golf ball at room temperature in the night sky from Logan to Italy. Batty said the instruments in the satellite could detect individual photons emanating from that golf ball in the night.
“And so the technical challenge is to thermally isolate these systems so that we reduce the parasitic heat that tries to get in,” Batty said. “You can imagine having one surface here at room temperature and another surface a half-inch away that is hundreds of degrees colder and saying, ‘Nature, don’t do your thing. Don’t let any heat flow from one surface to another.’ And that is the task. We’ve developed some systems and techniques to do that kind of thing.”