Solar-Powered Desalination System Turns Ocean Water Into Drinking Water, without Waste
The system turns seawater into fresh water and concentrates salts in solid residue, with researchers saying it could also recover lithium.
7 Articles
7 Articles
Solar-powered desalination system turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste
The United Nations estimates that 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, and communities from California to the Middle East rely on desalination plants to convert ocean water to fresh water. Common desalination ...
Sun-powered desalination system makes fresh water and recovers lithium
Researchers at the University of Rochester have developed a new solar-thermal desalination process that converts ocean water into fresh water using only sunlight. Even better, it solves the environmental crisis plaguing existing water plants: toxic waste. This novel method eliminates the need for chemical pre-treatments and completely avoids the creation of toxic liquid brine. The system was tested on actual water samples from the Pacific, Atlan…
The extraction of clean water and important raw materials for the energy transition are two major challenges. A new process based on evaporation is to be managed at the same time. The remaining salts are not a problem, but a resource.
© J. Adam Fenster / University of Rochester Self-cleaning desalination system uses sunlight to produce drinking water and lithium from seawater.
Solar Panels That Turn Seawater into Drinking Water Could Also Mine Lithium from the Ocean
Your shower head furs up. Your kettle goes white around the element. Your teapot acquires that stubborn calcium ring no amount of soaking quite shifts. These are the small, domestic irritants of hard water, and most of us have made a sort of peace with them. Now consider what happens to a solar desalination panel attempting to process real seawater, with its hundreds of times greater mineral load than your tap water, in the open sun, hour after …
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