A portable inexpensive solar desalination system for use anywhere in the world ...MIT

[Ichingcarpenter]

By inexpensively turning salt water into drinking water using sustainable solar power, a team from MIT in the US has not only come up with a portable desalination system for use anywhere in the world that needs it, but it’s just won the 2015 Desal Prize - a competition run by USAID to encourage better solutions to water shortages in developing countries.

In order to win the $140,000 prize, entries had to demonstrate how their invention not only works well, but is cost-effective, environmentally sustainable, and energy efficient. And the MIT researchers teamed up with US-based manufacturing company, Jain Irrigation Systems, to do just that.


The team’s invention works by using solar panels to charge a cache of batteries that power an electrodialysis machine that removes salt from the water and makes it perfectly drinkable. David L. Chandler explains for MIT News:

"Electrodialysis works by passing a stream of water between two electrodes with opposite charges. Because the salt dissolved in water consists of positive and negative ions, the electrodes pull the ions out of the water, Winter says, leaving fresher water at the centre of the flow. A series of membranes separate the freshwater stream from increasingly salty ones."


http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-turning-salt-water-into-drinking-water-using-solar-power

[longship]

1. First R&K nt

[yuiyoshida]

2. Would probably be very useful

In California !

[Orrex]

3. Has Nestle been reached for comment yet?

[TRoN33]

4. Nestle will find this project to be cost ineffective and not profitable enough for them.

They want all of American water resources gone for good.

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. Nestle bought all the patents and destroyed the device

for the betterment of mankind.

[rurallib]

5. looks pretty exciting and promising

hope we hear followups.

[The2ndWheel]

7. It's not inexpensive

Not when taking more of the picture into account. If it works, it'll keep more people alive, which will require more resources to be used, as more people will have more wants, needs, and desires.

Like any good corporation, we privatize the profits, and externalize the costs.

[Nihil]

9. Good point.

> If it works, it'll keep more people alive, which will require more resources to be used,
> as more people will have more wants, needs, and desires.

I had viewed it as an emergency resource - e.g., after an earthquake or hurricane/typhoon
damages the infrastructure - not a permanent "hey, let's breed more in the desert!"
type of thing.

[The2ndWheel]

10. Things don't stay small

Wal-Mart started out as a small business. Facebook started out in a dorm room for people at the college or whatever. The pet rock started out as a rock. Hummers were military vehicles. Bands of humans turned into villages, which turned into towns, into cities, into states, into nations.

[mackdaddy]

8. May not be new, just latest revival..

I find it interesting to try to find the original article that is the source of these announcements. Going back to the original article from MIT http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/solar-desalination-india-0908 it is interesting how many comments were basically "yea we did this 10 years ago but" it did not progress for one reason or another. Many of these comments were from engineers in India who had worked on the projects.

The solar panels are a lot less of course, but they also had problems getting a production source for the dialysis equipment.

One of the questions that was not addressed is what do you do with the concentrated salt water brine, and what other chemicals may be in this stuff other than sodium chloride standard salt?

Also interesting is that the article at the link in the OP thew in a video which had little to do with this project, but was about using graphene sheets with holes as membranes in reverse osmosis systems. I guess at least is was for desalinization systems, just not this dialysis type.

But clean water is a big issue, and will be worse in the future. It is good that this is getting attention again.