Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water

Comments

• qooqie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The part I found most important:

  “The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.”

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  • HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That could legit provide potable water for an entire house, with water to spare

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  • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If the parts are user-replaceable, that makes this invaluable for places like Polynesia where fresh water is becoming harder to acquire and people often live in remote small communities.

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• carl_dungeon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Doubt

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• Jaysyn@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is great to hear. This tech is going to need to be near ubiquitous in a decade.

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  • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This showed up in my feed just above a post about New Orleans saying they need a freshwater pipeline because of saltwater incursion into the Mississippi. The juxtaposition was eerie.

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• SquishyPandaDev@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  We are so fucked. Mother fuckers can’t use their brain for two seconds. What ya gonna do with all the salt. Power is only a little bit of limiting factor of desalination plants

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  • jadero@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    One of the challenging issues with a complex problem is that the problem is not solved until the whole thing is solved.

    One of the nice things about a complex problem is that you don’t have to solve the whole thing at once in order to make progress toward a complete solution.

    I don’t know the state of the art on dealing with waste brine. If that is already deemed insoluble above a certain scale, then we better not invest in anything that exceeds that scale. On the other hand, if research into handling waste brine in sustainable ways is ongoing and making progress, then why not continue attacking the extraction problem?

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    • m0darn@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I mean if the water is being used for drinking then put the brine into the treatment plant outfall so that it matches the salinity of the body of water it’s being discharge into…

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    • SquishyPandaDev@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Hey a perpetual motion machine violates the laws of physics. But why let that stop me from designing a power plant that uses one. One day will fix those pesky physics laws.

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  • Zoidsberg@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Put it on french fries in the summer, and the roads in the winter.

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    • njm1314@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s not nice and neat table salt. It usually comes to the form of an extremely toxic saline sludge. With who knows what other ingredients inside of it. It’s a major problem with this kind of thing. If you use it on an industrial scale a scale large enough to provide water for a city for instance, then you’re going to have enough output that will probably destroy whatever water source you’re extracting water from. Better hope no one fishes in that ocean, cuz they all going to die.

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    • SquishyPandaDev@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      the roads in the winter.

      Great fucking idea. Totally has zero issues with runoff. No one’s looking for an alternative because salting the road is so fucking awesome

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  • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    These plans are all so dumb. Where indeed does the salt go?

    Back in the ocean, raising local salinity?

    Uh, just make a mountain of it? Somewhere, somehow?

    Poison the land. Poison the sea. Pick one.

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• Unaware7013@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It would be interesting to see what adding in some small external heat sources to augment the evaporation and allow it to run 24/7 would do to the cost/production values.

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  • qooqie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I never took fluid dynamics but would this disrupt the small eddies forming in this device? It sounded like the small/gentler eddies are the primary reason the salt is able to move and exit in a way that won’t clog the machine.

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    • Unaware7013@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Possibly, but my take was that the solar heating is at the top of the device where the water/air comes into contact with the box walls. It sounded like they either use natural thermal convection or small devices to generate those currents. So the additional heat could make it run faster, or just trash the flows entirely.

      But at the same tack, if you know how much heat is being added to the system by the sun, you could set your resistive heaters to only add that much and decouple it from needing solar to work (allowing production during night/inclement weather situations, or the ability to run inside in colder climates).

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• dotslashme@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Don’t worry, some asshole will patent it and charge per bottle.

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  • AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I was thinking that Bug Tap Water was gonna come in, sabotage the thing whilst claiming it’s bad for everyone, and then bring their prices up.

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    • sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I know it's just a typo, but I refuse to drink zee bugs!
• D61@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Cool

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• sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A claim like that sorta sounds suspect.

  Depending on how one gets their tapwater, it could be as simple as drilling a hole in the ground and getting the water, or putting a bunch of sand in a basin. The per liter cost of getting intermediate raw water from a slow sand filter is infinitesimal, pennies per cubic meter. Water from a slow sand filter must then be chlorinated for distribution, but so does water from a desalination plant because chlorination isn't just for treating the water coming out of the tap, but it's for protecting the water as it goes through water lines.