171–180 of 230 posts
Awesome, love seeing stuff out of Rochester - RIT or UofR or any of the nearby schools. Totally underrated area for academic pursuits.
Indeed, it’s the same university that gave us room temperature superconductors.
There is a fundamental minimum amount of energy needed to desalinate: you can't take less energy to do it,than you could gain back (from osmotic pressure) if you allowed the desalinated water to expand a cylinder containing the residual brine. This is large. This paper is a thermal method, so it doesn't have an electricity input, but to justify their efficiency claim, they should really compare against what you could…
Focusing on pure energy efficiency might be missing the point of economic efficiency. An RO desalination plant needs electric energy to drive the pumps, which might be generated by panels which are 15-20% efficient. So, if you can have cheap thermal desalination panels, they come out ahead even if 6x less energy eficient, you avoid the whole expensive and fragile desalination plant and you gain a low skill, distribut…
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Indeed, it’s the same university that gave us room temperature superconductors.
Huh? That was University of Utah/Brigham Young University right. That is, if you're referring to Pons and Fleischman.
I believe the most efficient method to turn "ocean water into drinking water" is called "rain". We just need to better collect and transport the output of what is effectively the world's biggest solar-powered desalinator.
I believe the most efficient method to turn "ocean water into drinking water" is called "rain". We just need to better collect and transport the output of what is effectively the world's biggest solar-powered desalinator.
I believe the most efficient method to turn "ocean water into drinking water" is called "rain". We just need to better collect and transport the output of what is effectively the world's biggest solar-powered desalinator.
Slow it down from trickling down a slope and you have two things: more vegetation (which also retains water) and more time for that water to penetrate the ground for local wells.
You can completely "terraform" a desertic region https://youtube.com/shorts/cfhbtgon4Nk?is=oAExB5UeMAsShBux
The paper: [1] They're still at lab scale in glass. They haven't built a usable system, even a small one. The big claim here is that it doesn't clog; capillary action moves the salt out of the active area to another area, where some yet to be developed mechanism removes it. That needs to be demonstrated. If they can come up with something that runs for years without clogging or replacing the active material, that's a…
This is an interesting tech, but I have big doubts. In the picture you can see some salt coating the surface. Even just a little seems like too much for this type of system. I really hope they can make this work and scale this up.
Another MIT paper on desalination from 2024 has a more conventional electrically powered system that can adjust its operating speed depending on how much power is coming in. So it can run off intermittent power sources such as its own solar panels.[3] Rather than buffering the energy with batteries, just buffer the water in a tank. This made it to field test and has some efficiency numbers.
It's annoying to see these one-off announcements with no followup. A short note a year later reporting why there's no further work would be useful to later workers.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-...
[2] https://drl.mit.edu/publications/journal/
[3] https://www.greenmemag.com/science-technology/breakthrough-m...
>> The solar-powered system uses specially engineered black metal to absorb sunlight. The new system replaces the earlier version that used specially engineered death metal.
Which was a big upgrade from the prior system which just used a heavy rock.
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I can probably be convinced pretty easily with some evidence of that, but you’ll never convince the contingent who is convinced it’ll kill sea life at any concentration or location, so, being able to shut them up by saying “we have no wastewater, we load rail cars with crunchy salt and use it for stuff” still has value.
The goalposts will just shift to attack that excess salt instead. It’s like all of the FUD about datacenter water usage while people shove almonds in their mouths.
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Isn't it more akin in this case to worrying about too much carbon dioxide in the air?
Why is it akin to that? Doesn't the salt come from the sea in the first place?
Most of the carbon we spew into the atmosphere came from the air. Ancient plants took it in via respiration.