Student project consumes 17% of energy of traditional desalination plants

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• Gsus4@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s not clear from the article, but if this is a direct solar-to-dessalination I can understand how it uses less energy (why does it use any energy at all?) than other methods with pumps and such, the issue is rate maybe, but I can’t find a paper about this.

  Found fuelcellsworks.com/…/malaga-students-patent-an-in… which says it produces 1 cubic meter per day, which is great for small-scale seaside production. Again, I have no access to details of how 1 square meter of sunlight can dessalinate 1 cubic meter of water per day, but it’s great if it works, just wondering why solar dessalination hadn’t been tried to this degree of success before.

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  • AnonymousBaba@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • czarrie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Typically people will prefer the option that gives them a $50 water bill over a $200 one.

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• Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Current techniques appear to use around 1.8-2kWh/m3 for desalination. That would imply that this uses only 350-400Wh. You’d think you could her better production from 9m2 just going up a few solar panels and putting a conventional plant. I presume the author has no fucking clue how desalination of solar heating and distillation works and/or hasn’t even read the patent to find out how this works.

  Good on the student team for thinking creatively, but they seem to have only two engineers but four managers on the team. And not a single coherent description from those four managers, who seem very proud of taking credit for the students’ work.

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  • jecxjo@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m wondering if the “amazing” part is that its just physically smaller? It says less brine which means either its not pumping through a ton of seawater…or some how making the salt go somewhere. So I’m thinking its that its a small foot print and cheap materials meaning that its accessible to more people.

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    • Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      From some digging the “amazing” part is that it’s floating. I’m not sure how they do distribution and collection, but from the UMA page it’s a vapor distillation process - same as the old survival distillation process but on a floating platform. Solar energy heats the water, evaporating some, and it is passed over a cooler to condense the water. The “no brine” claim comes from the fact that they so inefficient that the localize increase in brine concentration due to the extraction of desalinated water is within the limits for not requiring treatment - they’re just lifting evaporate from the surface and (I’m guessing) using a low power circulation loop to draw water from below the surface as their condensation cooling loop. I suppose it’s possible that the cooling may even be a convectively driven vs a photoelectric conversion and standard pump, which would be useful for low maintenance. It’s a cool project, no doubt. I’m still not sure how they’re doing bulk collection and distribution of 1000kg of water a day. Maybe that’s the 17% energy figure. Maybe it’s someone else’s problem to solve.

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• luthis@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A single student’s project used 17% of a power plant’s energy production??

  That’s Insane! What the hell was he doing? Training chatGPT 7 on a supercomputer??

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  • eroc1990@lemmy.parastor.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I hope you’re not being serious lol. The article says the desalination plant designed by this student uses 17% of the power a normal desalination plant, meaning a 5+x reduction in energy consumption.

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    • luthis@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I know you’re just trying to get me to read the article instead of just commenting on the headline like I know what it’s all about, but that’s not going to happen!

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    • Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The article says the desalination plant designed by this student uses 17% of the power a normal desalination plant, meaning a 5+x reduction in energy consumption.

      “With nine square meters, it consumes only 17% of energy compared to traditional desalination plants.”

      Comparing based on size doesn’t seem too useful. How many square meters is a “traditional desalination plant”? How much salty water can it purify into drinkable water given a certain amount of energy compared to the student’s design?

      I hope it’s an improvement over existing designs, but unfortunately this article doesn’t have any actual content. It’s clickbait that hopes people will jump to conclusions like “it’s a 5x reduction in energy compared to the traditional approach” because that drives traffic.

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  • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Mining crypto?

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• Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Green hydrogen?

  What other colors can it come in?

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  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Is there bad hydrogen? 🤔

    The Hindenburg would have some things to say about this…

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    • T156@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      To be fair, it wasn’t designed for hydrogen, but helium.

      It’s like putting diesel into a petrol engine (or vice versa), and saying petrol is bad when the engine inevitably explodes.

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  • Whelks_chance@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yup. Green hydrogen comes from splitting water with electricity from renewables.

    Other flavours of hydrogen come from splitting natural gas, using electricity from burning stuff. Which isn’t as green.

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• FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  How do you handle the brine? “Minimal amounts” of brine is not an answer. What’s a minimal amount? What are you going to do with it? If you dump it back in the ocean, you increase salinity.

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  • apex32@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Why is increasing salinity of the ocean bad? Doesn’t that happen all the time on a much greater scale as ocean water evaporates into the atmosphere?

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    • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s bad. Very bad.

      e360.yale.edu/…/salt-scourge-the-dual-threat-of-w…

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  • jimbolauski@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The brine solution will contain concentrated amounts of elements, like lithium. That concentrated solution may be economicly viable to process.

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    • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Fine. What do you do about the salt?

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  • Stoneykins@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I can’t find a better explanation anywhere for how it works than “it uses condensation”

    So I have to guess the seawater is evaportated directly from the waters surface or something, which would just leave all the salts in there. That would be exactly as problematic as a traditional desalination plant pumping it’s brine back into the ocean. Maybe my guess about how it works is wrong though.

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    • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, it seems to me that you only have three options when it comes to the brine, and none of them are good- bury it and hope it doesn’t get into the water table, leave it where it is and hope it doesn’t leak, or dump it back in the ocean and increase ocean salinity. I don’t see another option.

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  • DrM@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t know if that works with brine. But what I know is that many regions fill old mines with salt and heat it up with excess energy from solar in the summer to use as general energy storage and for heat in the winter. That might be a good way to repurpose the brine

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    • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I said this in another comment- I’d be very worried it would get into the water table. That brine is not just salt. It’s also full of toxins. But maybe there are good solutions that I don’t know about.

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• NegentropicBoy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is very good news if it can be scaled.

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  • Newusername4oldfart@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Come back in 3+ years according to the article

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