A new approach to speeding up the evaporation of seawater has been hailed as a major breakthrough in desalination technology that will benefit billions of people around the world.
Up to 36% of the world’s eight billion people currently suffer from severe freshwater shortages for at least four months of the year, and this figure could potentially rise to 75% by 2050.
Seawater desalination is one of the most effective strategies to alleviate the looming shortage, but existing processes consume enormous amounts of energy, leaving a significant carbon footprint.
Other problems plaguing the production of fresh water from the sea include the need to descale membranes used in the reverse osmosis desalination process with chemicals toxic to marine life. Additionally, once the water is produced, the brackish byproduct is so rich in salt that it has the effect of an ecological contaminant.
Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA) have already demonstrated the potential of solar-powered evaporation as a sustainable and energy-efficient alternative to current desalination methods, but they are still limited by a rate of Lower evaporation of sea water compared to pure water due to the negative effect of salt ions on water evaporation.
Professor Haolan Xu, a materials science researcher at UniSA, has now collaborated with Chinese researchers on a project to develop a simple but effective strategy to reverse this limitation.
By presentation By integrating common, inexpensive clay minerals like zeolite and bentonite into a floating photothermal hydrogel evaporator, the team achieved seawater evaporation rates 18.8% higher than those of pure water. This is a significant advance since previous studies have all shown that evaporation rates from seawater are about 8% lower than those from pure water.
The researchers say the hydrogel evaporator retained its performance even after months of immersion in seawater.
“The key to this advancement lies in the ion exchange process at the air-water interface,” Xu explains.
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“Minerals selectively enrich magnesium and calcium ions from seawater to evaporating surfaces, which increases the rate of evaporation of seawater. This ion exchange process occurs spontaneously during of solar evaporation, making it very practical and cost-effective.
Since the global desalination market has approximately 21,000 operational plants worldwide, even a slight decline in desalination performance can result in the loss of tens of millions of tons of clean water.
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“This new strategy, which could be easily integrated into existing evaporative desalination systems, will provide additional access to huge amounts of clean water, benefiting billions of people around the world,” Xu said.
Fossil fuels power most of the world’s desalination plants, and experimental machines attempting to decarbonize the industry have solar energy usedand mechanical energy of the movement of the waves.
Take the salt out of the news and share this new innovation…