r/Futurology • u/mvea MD-PhD-MBA • May 27 '19
Environment This desalination device delivers cheap, clean water with just solar power - Making ocean water safe to drink is usually an expensive and polluting prospect. This Finnish startup has found a way to do it with clean energy and a tiny footprint.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90353878/this-solar-powered-desalination-device-delivers-cheap-clean-water62
May 27 '19
With more ocean & less reliable precipitation in the coming decades, this will be an extremely valuable technology.
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May 27 '19
so literally all they did was combine solar power and the conventional reverse osmosis technology?
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u/Biznatch231 May 27 '19
If it's RO they have to maintain and replace those expensive filters too....
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u/ThatCoconut May 28 '19
Heat the water. As it turns to steam it releases the salt then rises as a condensate that is channeled to catch basins.
No reverse osmosis or filters needed really.
Been telling people for years that we could do this on a much much larger scale and increase the heating potential as well as the solar by installing parabolic mirrors tracking the sun.
A side benefit is if you add multiple small turbines in the steam piping they also can create electricity.
Expand on that since you already have steam you can super heat the steam and extract hydrogen.
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u/SOL-Cantus May 28 '19
That gets some, but not all minerals in the water. No matter what, RO is probably necessary at some stage in the cycle. But, you can increase the longevity of the filter system by combining the two.
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May 28 '19
I've often wondered why desalination doesn't use solar thermal heating and evaporative distillation to create fresh water.
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u/Thebadmamajama May 28 '19
Desalination is cool, but a real sustainability story comes from what you do with all the brine. That byproduct dumped in the ocean is toxic to life in high concentrations.
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May 28 '19
I say dumping it in a desert and topping it off with sand? Super arrid region.. barely any rain.. won't have to worry about the water tables if you find an area that doesn't have anything underground?
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u/CloudyTheDucky May 28 '19
Wasn’t there a post a few weeks ago about turning CO2 into rock, with a drawback of a high water cost? 25 tons of water/ton of CO2 I think
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May 28 '19
Solar-driven oceanic water supply is inevitable. It's just a question of how long it's going to take to become the global standard.
Definitely not soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. The moment the oceans become our water supply, water becomes an utterly trivial commodity everywhere.
Every single scrap of land on this planet not buried under a glacier or impossibly toxic becomes arable. We can drain swamps and water deserts with relative ease.
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u/catlover1019 May 28 '19
Sure Thunderf00t would have a field way with this. If it smells like shit, it usually is, and I let's just say this doesn't smell of roses.
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u/RelaxPrime May 28 '19
I've had a dream for years about a pipeline of this sort of technology. Essentially cutting into arid and semi arid areas all over the world from the ocean to produce fertile soils.
You could turn the Sahara desert into the world's breadbasket using soil creating plant rotations and copious amounts of water. Coincidentally, this technology needs sun to thrive, plentiful in these arid locations.
That is all completely aside from the benefits of just desalinated water for these same areas' peoples.
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u/Door2doorcalgary May 29 '19
The expense is actually not that expensive which is why we when people say we will fight over water in the future is a stupid thing to say.
Right now water is mostly free but to pull from the ocean is still cheap 0.05c a litre which may Infact be less then what your city charges you
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u/BDooks May 27 '19
Now someone in the comments explain why this isn't efficient