Ingenious solar distiller makes fresh water from seawater for less than 1cent a gallon [View all]

[LiberalArkie]

It’s pretty easy to get the salt out of seawater. All you have to do is boil it, freeze it, or just wait for rain! But those things take a lot of energy and/or time that many of us don’t have to spare. So people have been working on low-cost and low-energy-input ways to do it, such as solar desalination.

We seem to have hit on a really good one here, thanks to a collaboration between MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). I couldn’t even cram all the benefits of this thing into my diary title.

This device breaks the record for rate of fresh water production from seawater by a solar device, and as awesome as that is, it’s actually kind of a charming side note. The bigger breakthrough is that the device can keep running up near this rate for a long time without getting fouled by salt accumulation, and it does this by emulating natural processes that occur in the sea. That cuts costs by about 10x compared to typical solar desalination, making the cost of the fresh water it produces comparable to that of tap water.

Oh, and because it doesn’t accumulate salt, it can process water containing up to 20% salt (seawater has only 3.5% salt, and salt-saturated water has about 26%). Other solar desalination devices can’t even operate with water that salty. That means you can use this kind of device to process the wastewater from existing desalination systems, to get even more fresh water.

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/30/2196209/-Ingenious-solar-distiller-makes-fresh-water-from-seawater-for-less-than-1-a-gallon