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Desalination Technology
Technology
that Converts Our Sea Water to Drinkable Water
engineeringinsider
As we know our earth contains 70 percent of water and 30 percent
landscape.
In which we know that only 3 percent of 70 percent is drinking
water.
Population on the earth increasing day by day and our needs and
consumption of water is also increasing because it is the main source of our
life.
But the level of drinkable water decreases drastically due
to many factors.
So, we need a technology that can convert salty ocean water to
the drinkable fresh water, this process is called desalination.
This process takes a very large amount of energy which is equal
to 10 to 1000 times of pumping water from wells.
Taking this in concern, a team of engineers from the Department
of Energy at Politecnico di Torino has invented this desalination technology
that uses solar power energy to convert salt water into fresh water.
This technology is cost effective because it uses solar power as
its energy to perform this task. It also doubles the amount of water production
as compared to previous technology.
The principle behind the desalination of water
This technology is inspired by plants which transport water
from roots to leaves by capillarity.
(Capillary action is the
movement of liquid along a surface of a solid caused by the attraction of
molecules of the liquid to the molecules of the solid) and transpiration.
How does it work?
The floating device is able to gather ocean water by using a
low-cost porous material. Thus we can avoid the use of costly and heavy
pumps.
When the sea water is collected then it will heat up by solar
energy, which helps us to separate the salt from the evaporating water.
This process can make easy by membranes inserted between
contaminated / mixed water and drinking water to avoid their mixing, just like
some plants which are able to survive in saltwater environments.
Advantages
Researchers said, before this technique we used heavy
machines and costly equipment to do this process and require a specialized technique
for installation and its maintenance.
This desalination process without the need for heavy components
is called ‘passive technology.’
This technology is highly effective in the coastal
regions that are suffering from a chronic shortage of drinking
water.
The Politecnico’s engineers claim that this technology could
have an impact in isolated coastal locations with little drinking water but a
good amount of solar energy, especially in developing countries.
Disadvantages
The main disadvantage of passive technologies for desalination
has been the low energy efficiency as compared to ‘active’ ones.
Before we had focused on how to increase the solar energy
absorption, we have switched our concern to more efficient management of the
absorbed solar thermal energy.
Researchers at Politecnico di Torino take a test of this
technology in a coastal area where they got 20 litres of drinking water per
square meter exposed to the sun.
They make improvement just because of water recycled many
times in cascade evaporation processes.
This type of process is called multi-effective and they find it
in their research. Researchers are still continued with their process in the
coaster areas.
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