Water. It’s essential for life, but according to the WWF, about 1.1 billion people worldwide do not have access to water, and a total of 2.7 billion find water scarce for at least one month of the year.
In addition, inadequate sanitation, caused by water shortages, is also a problem for 2.4 billion people, making them vulnerable to diseases such as cholera and typhus. 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 attention paid to the use of solar evaporation to create fresh drinking water, but previous techniques have been too inefficient to be practically useful,” said Haolan Xu, an associate professor at the University of South Australia. said in a statement.
“We have overcome the inefficiencies, and our technology can now supply 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 cost-effectively using sustainable materials and sunlight. To achieve this, they have designed an extremely efficient photothermal structure that sits on the surface of a water source and converts sunlight into heat.
‘Previously, many of the experimental photothermal evaporators were basically two-dimensional; they were just a flat surface, and they could lose 10 to 20 percent of solar energy through the largest amount of water and the surrounding environment, ‘Xu added.
‘We have developed a technique that not only prevents loss of solar energy, but also draws extra energy from the large water and surrounding environment, which means that the system is 100% efficient for solar input and that it still receives 170 percent energy water and environment. ”
If the invention is fruitful, it could change the lives of billions of people worldwide.