The part I found most important:
“The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.”
That could legit provide potable water for an entire house, with water to spare
If the parts are user-replaceable, that makes this invaluable for places like Polynesia where fresh water is becoming harder to acquire and people often live in remote small communities.
Doubt
This is great to hear. This tech is going to need to be near ubiquitous in a decade.
This showed up in my feed just above a post about New Orleans saying they need a freshwater pipeline because of saltwater incursion into the Mississippi. The juxtaposition was eerie.
It would be interesting to see what adding in some small external heat sources to augment the evaporation and allow it to run 24/7 would do to the cost/production values.
I never took fluid dynamics but would this disrupt the small eddies forming in this device? It sounded like the small/gentler eddies are the primary reason the salt is able to move and exit in a way that won’t clog the machine.
Possibly, but my take was that the solar heating is at the top of the device where the water/air comes into contact with the box walls. It sounded like they either use natural thermal convection or small devices to generate those currents. So the additional heat could make it run faster, or just trash the flows entirely.
But at the same tack, if you know how much heat is being added to the system by the sun, you could set your resistive heaters to only add that much and decouple it from needing solar to work (allowing production during night/inclement weather situations, or the ability to run inside in colder climates).
Don’t worry, some asshole will patent it and charge per bottle.
I was thinking that Bug Tap Water was gonna come in, sabotage the thing whilst claiming it’s bad for everyone, and then bring their prices up.
I know it’s just a typo, but I refuse to drink zee bugs!
A claim like that sorta sounds suspect.
Depending on how one gets their tapwater, it could be as simple as drilling a hole in the ground and getting the water, or putting a bunch of sand in a basin. The per liter cost of getting intermediate raw water from a slow sand filter is infinitesimal, pennies per cubic meter. Water from a slow sand filter must then be chlorinated for distribution, but so does water from a desalination plant because chlorination isn’t just for treating the water coming out of the tap, but it’s for protecting the water as it goes through water lines.
