When the sun also makes sea water. In a global context in which the water emergency becomes increasingly pressing, an innovation destined to change the future of sunburns arrives. A team of researchers from the Olsan National Institute of Science & Technology (UNIST), in South Korea, has developed a device capable of transforming sea water into drinking water using only the energy of the sun, without any need for electricity.
The system, thanks to the use of a cutting -edge material and an ingenious design, manages to produce up to 3.4 liters of drinking water per hour, representing a turning point in the fight against global water deficiency.
How the new system works
The technological heart of this device is a material in perovskite, the la₀.₇sr₀.₃mno₃, capable of converting sunlight into heat in an extremely efficient way. The operation is based on the formation of states of intra-utilization, which facilitate the non-radiative recombination of electron and photo-excited gaps, significantly increasing the thermal performance of the process.
One of the main obstacles to the spread of sunbishation is the accumulation of salt, which tends to form on the surface of photothermal materials, reducing their efficiency and increasing maintenance costs. The Korean team has brilliantly overcome this problem with a unidirectional flow configuration, which induces the formation of a saline gradient. In this way, the salt is pushed towards the edges of the photothermal material, avoiding the obstruction of the active surface.
This technical solution not only improves general performance, but also guarantees greater durability of the system, minimizing cleaning or replacement to a minimum.
3.4 liters/hour and resistance also in concentrated brackish solutions
The system developed at UNIST has reached an evaporation rate of 3.4 kg/m²/h, which corresponds to about 3.4 liters of drinking water per hour in standard conditions of sunlight. It is a clearly higher performance than the average values so far obtained with other similar devices, which are between 0.3 and 0.4 kg/m²/h.
The tests conducted confirmed the high resistance of the device, capable of working permanently for two weeks even in saline solutions with 20% of salt, a much higher concentration than that of traditional sea water.
According to Dr. Saurav Chaule, the main author of the study, the evaporator in the shape of an inverted form not only allows an efficient desalinization, but can also be used for sustainable recovery applications of resources, such as the extraction of rooms in controlled environments.
The new system represents a concrete, cheap and easily scalable solution to face one of the most urgent challenges of our time: the lack of drinking water. The device works without electricity and could be made at low cost, making it suitable for isolated or developing communities.
Professor Ji-Hyun Jang, one of the main researchers of the project, underlined the importance of integration between innovative structural design and advanced materials to obtain high-performance photothermal devices. The goal for the future is to develop larger modules, consisting of several evaporators with the same inverted L -shape, to further increase efficiency and cover larger areas.
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