Water. It’s essential for all of life, but according to the WWF About 1.1 billion people around the world have no access to water, and a total of 2.7 billion people find water scarcity for at least a month of the year.
In addition, inadequate sanitation caused by water shortages is also a problem for 2.4 billion people, leaving them vulnerable to diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever. What if there was a way to produce clean and safe drinking and bathing water using only sunlight?
“In recent years there has been a lot of focus on using solar evaporation to make fresh drinking water, but previous techniques were too inefficient to be practical,” said Haolan Xu, associate professor at the University of South Australia . said in a statement.
“We have overcome those inefficiencies and our technology can now provide enough fresh water to meet many practical needs at a fraction of the cost of existing technologies such as reverse osmosis.”
Xu and his team have developed a way to collect water that is cost effective by using sustainable materials and sunlight. To achieve this, they designed a highly efficient photothermal structure that sits on the surface of a water source and converts sunlight into heat.
“In the past, many of the experimental photothermal evaporators were essentially two-dimensional; they were just a flat surface and they could lose 10 to 20 percent of the solar energy to the bulk water and the environment, ”added Xu.
“We have developed a technique that not only prevents the loss of solar energy, but also actually extracts extra energy from the bulk water and the environment, which means that the system is 100 percent efficient for the solar energy and an additional 170 percent energy. from the water and environment. “
If the invention proves fruitful, it could change the lives of billions of people around the world.