Water is an essential element in human life activities. However, there are a lot of water in the world that humans cannot drink due to problems such as salt or bacteria contained in water. In the midst of this, a device for desalination of seawater was developed to remove salt from seawater and convert it into drinkable fresh water using a power plant.
Every year, 844 million people cannot get clean water, and one newborn dies from water every minute. 3% of the world’s total energy consumption goes to water treatment. From these points alone, it can be seen that seawater desalination and wastewater reuse are global challenges.
The seawater desalination device developed by the Monash University research team is made into a disk shape by coating a super-hydrophilic filter paper with a property of attracting water with carbon nanotubes. Seawater entering this evaporative dehydration disk is evaporated by receiving solar thermal energy absorbed by the carbon nanotubes. The evaporated water stays in the filter paper of the evaporative dehydration disk to determine the salinity and the fresh water is discharged to the outer edge of the disk.
The video released by the research team progressed 18,000 times faster. In the video, it is a seawater desalination device developed by the black disk in the center. After 100 hours, salt crystals begin to accumulate on the outer edge of the evaporative dehydration disk, and salt still continues to form after 500 hours. According to the announcement, the seawater desalination system not only removes nearly 100% of salt from seawater, but can also be used for decontamination. The research team has already tested the operation of the seawater desalination system in southern Australia, and the evaporative dewatering disk can produce 8 liters of fresh water from 6 ㄹ per 1 m2 per day.
This seawater desalination technology is expected to be used not only for securing drinking water in countries or regions with insufficient power infrastructure, but also for non-draining, sludge dewatering, and resource recovery from wastewater, which converts difficult liquid waste into solid. The research team hopes that the study will help millions of people supply drinking water, recover resources from wastewater, and even explain the impact of wastewater on the environment. Related information can be found here .