water needs

Solar-powered desalination

November 7, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

People in remote, low-income regions far from the ocean often need to meet their water needs from groundwater and groundwater is becoming increasingly saline due to climate change. Desalination of brackish groundwater is a huge and largely untapped source of drinking water, but there are challenges in making the process efficient and reliable.

Engineers at MIT have developed a solar-powered desalination system that requires no batteries or external power sources and is capable of producing large quantities of clean water despite the variations of sunshine throughout the day.

The system is based on the process of electrodialysis and consists of water pumps, an ion-exchange membrane stack, and a solar panel array. What is unique about it is that it makes use of sensors and a control system that predicts the optimal rate at which to pump water through the system based on the output of the solar panels. As a result, it uses nearly all of the electricity generated to produce clean water and does not need stored or grid-based energy.

The MIT engineers tested a community-scale prototype on groundwater wells in New Mexico over a six-month period. The system harnessed on average over 94% of the electricity generated by its solar panels and produced as much as 5,000 liters of water per day despite large variations in weather and sunlight.

The new renewable-powered, battery-free system could provide much-needed drinking water at low cost, especially for communities where access to seawater and to grid power are limited. The team plans to further test and scale up the system so it can supply larger communities and even whole municipalities with low-cost drinking water.

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Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries

Photo courtesy of Shane Pratt.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A Better Solar Evaporator | Earth Wise

May 21, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Water security is a serious global problem. Nearly 1.5 billion people – including almost half a billion children – live in areas of high or extremely high water vulnerability. Less than 3% of the world’s water is fresh and demand for it is rising with increasing population growth, urbanization, and growing water needs from a range of sectors.

Researchers at the University of South Australia have developed a promising new technique that could help reduce or eliminate water stress for millions of people. The technique uses highly efficient solar evaporation to obtain fresh water from seawater, brackish water, or even contaminated water. According to the researchers, their technique can deliver enough daily fresh drinking water for a family of four from just one square meter of source water.

Solar evaporation has been the focus of a great deal of effort in recent years, but it has generally been found to be too inefficient to be practically useful. The new technique overcomes those inefficiencies and can deliver fresh water at a fraction of the cost of existing technologies like reverse osmosis.

The system utilizes a highly efficient photothermal structure that sits on the surface of a water source and converts sunlight to heat, focusing energy precisely on the surface to rapidly evaporate the uppermost portion of the liquid. The technique prevents any loss of solar energy and even draws additional energy from the bulk water and surrounding environment.

The system is built entirely from simple, everyday materials that are low cost, sustainable, and easily obtainable.

The technology has the potential to provide a long-term clean water solution to people who can’t afford other systems, and these are the places where such solutions are most needed.

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Sunlight to solve the world’s clean water crisis

Photo, posted November 13, 2016, courtesy of Steve Austin via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Glaciers And Water Supply

March 25, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The world has roughly 150,000 glaciers covering about 200,000 square miles of the earth’s surface. Over the last 40 years they’ve lost the equivalent of a layer of ice 70 feet thick. Most of them are getting shorter as well. Some have shrunk to nothing; many smaller glaciers in places like the Rockies and the Andes have disappeared entirely.

Glaciers represent the snows of centuries, compressed over time to form flowing rivers of ice. They always change over time, accumulating snow in winter and losing ice to melting in summer. But in recent times, the warming climate has allowed the melting to outpace the accumulation.

Much of the discussion about the retreating glaciers relates to sea level rise, catastrophic floods, debris flow, and the effects on rivers and ecosystems.

But in some places, the biggest impact of the loss of glaciers is on the supply of water for people and agriculture. In Kazakhstan, Almaty, the country’s largest city depends on glacier-fed rivers for drinking water for its 2 million people and for irrigation water for crops. All across the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan and Karakmoram mountain ranges, hundreds of millions of people rely on glacier-fed rivers for their water supplies.

A melting glacier can at first increase stream flow but eventually reaches a tipping point and meltwater begins to taper. In the short term, the melting glaciers may provide increased amounts of water coming down from the mountains, but eventually the flow in the rivers will begin to decline and populations will face a crisis.

It will be essential for people in many places to carefully plan for their future water needs in a changing world.

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Glaciers Are Retreating. Millions Rely on Their Water.

Photo, posted September 16, 2011, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.