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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @07:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @07:05PM (#123814)

    No link to the kickstarter page for that brilliant idea?!

    All snark aside is this proposed method cheaper than existing desalination plants which produce several thousand gallons a day? Most of them are not just running out to the ocean to pick up a couple of buckets of water and tossing them into another bucket and waiting for it to evaporate. Most of them are a reverse osmosis process and they just switch out the filters on a regular bases. Requiring pretty much only the ability to pump water and a bit of pressure and the ability to dump buckets of chemicals into the waiting tanks. Once setup the plants are fairly cheap to run. It is the init setup that is the kicker which it sounds like this would have as well.

    http://www.oas.org/DSD/publications/Unit/oea59e/ch20.htm [oas.org]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination [wikipedia.org]