The water. It’s essential for life, but according to the WWF, about 1.1 billion people worldwide do not have access to water and a total of 2.7 billion believe that water has been low for at least a month of the year.
In addition, inadequate sanitation, caused by lack of water, is also a problem for 2.4 billion people, making them vulnerable to diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever. What if there is a way to produce safe and safe drinking and bathing water using only sunlight?
“In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to using solar evaporation to create fresh drinking water, but previous techniques have been too ineffective to be practical,” 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 provide 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 using durable materials and sunlight. To achieve this, they designed an extremely efficient photothermal structure, which is located on the surface of a water source and turns sunlight into heat.
“Previously, many of the experimental photothermal vaporizers were practically two-dimensional; they were just a flat surface and could lose between 10 and 20% of their solar energy due to bulk water and the environment, ”Xu added.
“We have developed a technique that not only prevents any loss of solar energy, but actually attracts additional energy from bulk water and the environment, which means that the system works with 100% efficiency for solar input and extracts with more 170% energy from water and environment. ”
If the invention proves successful, it could change the lives of billions of people around the world.