According to the International Desalination Association, more than 300 million people around the world now get their drinking water from the sea. With climate change exacerbating water scarcity globally, seawater desalination is stepping in to fill the void. But whereas commercial desalination plants are designed to meet large-scale demand, there is also a need for portable systems that can be carried into remote regions or set up as stand-ins for municipal water works in the wake of a disaster.
The unit weighs less than 10 kilograms, does not require the use of filters, and can be powered by a small, portable solar panel.
The most notable feature of the unit is its unfiltered design. A filter is a barrier that catches the impurities you don’t want in your water, explains Jongyoon Han, an electrical and biological engineer, and lead author of the study. “We don’t have that specifically because it always tends to clog, and [then] you need to replace it.” This makes traditional portable systems challenging for laypeople to use. Instead, the researchers use ion-concentration polarization (ICP) and electrodialysis (ED) to separate the salt from the water.
“Instead of filtering, we are nudging the contaminants [in this case, salt] away from the water,” Han says. This portable unit, he adds, is a good demonstration of the effectiveness of ICP desalination technology. “It is quite different from other technologies, in the sense that I can remove both large particles and solids all together.”
Link: Simple, Cheap, and Portable: A Filter-Free Desalination System for a Thirsty World
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