Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 12 submissions in the queue.
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.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @04:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @04:54PM (#123770)

    There is a program called Wine that runs windows programs on linux. (terribly)

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Funny=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @05:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @05:06PM (#123773)

    Try a recent version. I've gotten Wine to run 64-bit Windows programs on Arch Linux as an inexpensive alternative to WOW64.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @05:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @05:19PM (#123782)

      WOW64 is the 32-bit compatibility layer of Windows64, idiot.