Water. It’s essential for a lifetime, but according to the WWF, about 1.1 billion people worldwide have no access to water and a total of 2.7 billion believe water is scarce for at least a month of the year.
In addition, inadequate sanitation, caused by water scarcity, is also a problem for 2.4 billion people, making them vulnerable to diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever. What if there was a way to produce clean and safe bath and bath water using only sunlight?
“In recent years, there has been a lot of attention 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, he said in a statement.
“We have overcome these inefficiencies and our technology can now supply enough fresh water to support 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 through the use of 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.
“Previously, many of the experimental photothermal evaporators were basically two-dimensional; they were just a flat surface and could lose 10 to 20 percent of solar energy from bulk water and the surrounding environment, ”Xu added.
“We have developed a technique that not only prevents any loss of solar energy, but actually extracts additional energy from bulk water and the surrounding environment, which means that the system works with 100 percent efficiency for solar input and extracts up to another 170 percent of energy from water and the environment. “
If the invention proves fruitful, it could change the lives of billions of people around the world.