this could be really important and may throw the door open to ample experimentation.
Think collodal clay suspension assisting in salt collodialization while back flowing fresh water driven by solar flux.
The phenomena is there and this is the necessary road to productivity.
Of course I want to pump sea water uphill onto desert water paddies using salt resistent plants to provide surface cover. This deeply humidifies the air inducing evening rainfall which will soon transport the salt down stream. Evolve to forest cover.
Billions of People Could Benefit from This Breakthrough in Desalination That Ensures Freshwater for the World
-Dec 6, 2024
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/billions-of-people-could-benefit-from-this-breakthrough-in-desalination-that-ensures-freshwater-for-the-world/
A novel approach to making seawater evaporate faster has been hailed as a significant breakthrough in desalination technology that will benefit billions of people worldwide.
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 could potentially increase to 75% by 2050.
Seawater desalination is one of the most effective strategies to alleviate the impending scarcity, but existing processes consume massive amounts of energy, leaving a large carbon footprint.
Other problems plague the production of fresh water from the sea, including the necessity to de-scale membranes used in the reverse-osmosis desalination process with chemicals that are toxic to sea life. Furthermore, once the water is produced, the briny by-product is so overly 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 an energy-efficient, sustainable alternative to current desalination methods, but they are still limited by a lower evaporation rate for seawater compared to pure water due to the negative effect of salt ions on water evaporation.
UniSA materials science researcher Professor Haolan Xu has now collaborated with researchers from China on a project to develop a simple yet effective strategy to reverse this limitation.
By introducing inexpensive and common clay minerals like zeolite and bentonite into a floating photothermal hydrogel evaporator, the team achieved seawater evaporation rates that were 18.8% higher than pure water. This is a significant breakthrough since previous studies all found seawater evaporation rates were around 8% lower than pure water.
The researchers say the hydrogel evaporator maintained its performance even after months of immersion in seawater.
“The key to this breakthrough lies in the ion exchange process at the air-water interface,” Xu says.
“The minerals selectively enrich magnesium and calcium ions from seawater to the evaporation surfaces, which boosts the evaporation rate of seawater. This ion exchange process occurs spontaneously during solar evaporation, making it highly convenient and cost-effective.”
Considering the global desalination market numbers around 21,000 operational plants worldwide, even small declines in desalination performance can result in the loss of tens of millions of tons of clean water.
“This new strategy, which could be easily integrated into existing evaporation-based desalination systems, will provide additional access to massive amounts of clean water, benefitting billions of people worldwide,” Xu says.
Fossil fuels are what power most of the world’s desalination plants, and experimental machines trying to de-carbonize the industry have used solar power, and mechanical energy from the movement of waves.
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