The invention that makes it possible to convert seawater into drinking water in just half an hour
Seawater desalination is a viable option for the world's water scarcity.
How can you turn salt water in drinking in a sustainable way and in a short time?
How can you turn salt water in drinking in a sustainable way and in a short time?
Using a special high-tech solar energy filter.
A global research team developed pioneering technology that can make large volumes of seawater safe to drink in less than 30 minutes.
This technological breakthrough could provide drinking water to millions of people around the world using energy more efficiently than current desalination practices, says a statement from Melbourne, Australiabased Monash University.
And “remote communities could benefit the most,” Professor Huanting Wang, who leads the project, tells BBC Mundo.
How does it work?
The specially designed filter can generate hundreds of liters of drinking water per day and only requires direct sunlight to purify, making the process energy efficient, low cost and sustainable.
Organometallic compounds (MOF), which consist of metal ions that form a crystalline material, are used to manufacture the filter.
“The saline water runs through the tube (covered with an aluminum foil), where the salts are adsorbed without light, producing fresh water”, explains Professor Huanting Wang.
During the desalination process, the filter, which is named after PSP-MIL-53, it first adsorbs (attracts and retains molecules or ions from another body on its surface) the salts of the water and then is placed under sunlight to regenerate.
That process takes less than four minutes, before the filter can adsorb the salt from the water again.
Desalination and health risks
The World Health Organization suggests that good quality drinking water should have a total dissolved solid (TDS) of less than 600 milligrams per liter (mg / l).
Researchers were able to achieve a TDS of less than 500 mg / L in just half an hour and regenerating the MOF filter for reuse under sunlight.
This process was able to filter harmful particles from the water and generate 139.5 liters of clean water per kilogram of MOF per day.
Professor Wang, from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Monash University,
advocates desalination as a viable option to solve the world‘s lack of water.
“Due to the availability of seawater and brackish water – that which has more dissolved salts than fresh water, but less than seawater-, as desalination processes are reliable, the treated water can be integrated into the systems aquatic systems with minimal health risks, “says Wang.
“But evaporative thermal desalination processes and other technologies, such as reverse osmosis – which uses a semi-permeable membrane to remove larger ions, molecules and particles – have a number of drawbacks, including high energy consumption and the use of chemicals in cleaning and dechlorination of membranes “, he warns.
Because of its low power consumption and no need for chemicals during the process, Wang says this new sunlight technology can be part of future clean water solutions.
“Solar energy for filtering has been used for a long time, where water evaporates and condenses to produce fresh water. But it takes many hours to produce enough water for domestic use. We use sunlight to recycle our material, and it only takes a few minutes.“, he tells BBC Mundo.
When asked about the cost of this new device, the professor said that there is still a long way to go to make it affordable for the population.
“Material synthesized in the laboratory is not cheap. The cost of its production is expected to decrease significantly when it is manufactured on a large scale,” he says.
“We hope that the material will be widely available and affordable after further research and development,” he concluded.