Researchers At Australian University Harnessing Sunlight To Solve Clean Water Crisis

CANBERRA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 16th Apr, 2021 ) --:A research team from the University of South Australia (UniSA) on Friday announced that it has created a cheap and sustainable device to deliver drinking water to billions of people.

Haolan Xu, the leader of the team, said that the device - a photothermal structure - derives fresh water from seawater, brackish water or contaminated water through highly efficient solar evaporation.

He said it was capable of deriving enough drinking water for a family of four for one day from one square meter of source water.

"In recent years, there has been a lot of attention on using solar evaporation to create fresh drinking water, but previous techniques have been too inefficient to be practically useful," Xu said in a media release.

"We have overcome those inefficiencies, and our technology can now deliver enough fresh water to support many practical needs at a fraction of the cost of existing technologies like reverse osmosis." Xu explained that they extract energy from the bulk water during solar evaporation and use it for evaporation, and this has helped their process become efficient enough to deliver between 10 and 20 liters of fresh water per square meter per day.

The new device was superior to similar technologies because it is more efficient, practical and made from low-cost and sustainable materials, said Xu.

"One of the main aims with our research was to deliver for practical applications, so the materials we used were just sourced from the hardware store or supermarket," he said.

"The only exception is the photothermal materials, but even there we are using a very simple and cost-effective process, and the real advances we have made are with the system design and energy nexus optimization, not the materials."He said that because it is so simple and requires virtually no maintenance, there is no technical expertise needed to keep it running and upkeep costs are minimal.

"This technology really has the potential to provide a long-term clean water solution to people and communities who can't afford other options, and these are the places such solutions are most needed," said Xu.