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posted by janrinok on Monday December 08 2014, @03:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the new-twist-on-old-idea dept.

phys.org has an article on a new solar powered water desalination system.

Through a combination of thermal, electrical and heat exchange, the result is pure clean drinking water through the power of the sun. Specifically, Desolenator maximizes the solar radiation that hits the surface area of the system to boil water to get a yield over 15 liters of water per day. Solar panels typically convert only about 15 to 18 percent of the solar radiation that hits them into energy, but Desolenator also harvests the heat that would otherwise be lost and directs this to heat the salt or polluted water.

Desolenator will desalinate water at a lower cost per liter, [they] said, than any system at this scale available on the market today. But what about other drinking water and desalination technologies on the market? The Desolenator team said that existing solutions are not viable. CEO of Desolenator, William Janssen, said that "A massive 97 percent of the world's water is salt water and our plan is to tap into this valuable and available resource to disrupt the global water crisis in an unprecedented way. The process is called desalination and today whilst 0.7 percent of the world's water comes from desalination, existing technology is expensive, inefficient and disproportionally drains 0.5 percent of the world's global energy supply."

The Desolinator homepage has more detail, including links to an indiegogo campaign which is raising funds for scaling up the prototype to production scale. This device is also covered at optics.org.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday December 08 2014, @04:24PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday December 08 2014, @04:24PM (#123762)

    They're also going to have to demonstrate that their product is significantly better than the solar still [wikipedia.org]. They would hardly be the first company claiming some complicated high-tech solution to do something truly amazing which turns out to be not all that useful because there's a simple way to do the same thing that works just as well.

    If they get the funding they need, that would be nowhere as astoundingly stupid as the company that managed to raise $1.5 million by pushing for solar roadways, which is approximately the dumbest possible way to try to use solar panels [drroyspencer.com] but sounds good enough that a lot of idiots fell for it and invested.

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