Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries

MIT  News October 8, 2024 In the developing world, where there are unreliable energy sources of water, they rely increasingly on saline groundwater. Traditional renewable desalination technologies require sizable energy storage for sufficient water production, leading to increased cost, maintenance and complexity. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, UK, Germany) demonstrated a simple control strategy using photovoltaic electrodialysis (PV-ED) to enable direct-drive optimally controlled desalination at high production rates. This control scheme was implemented on a fully autonomous, community-scale PV-ED prototype system and operated for 6 months in New Mexico on real brackish groundwater. The prototype fully harnessed 94% […]

Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive desalination

Science Daily  February 14, 2022 Salt accumulation is one of the key bottlenecks for reliable solar evaporation techniques. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, China) developed a wick-free layered system, with dark material at the top to absorb the sun’s heat, then a thin layer of water above a perforated layer of polyurethane, sitting atop a deep reservoir of the salty water such as a tank or a pond. Through calculations and experiments they determined the holes size in the polyurethane sheet to be 2.5 mm across for optimal convective circulation between the warmer upper layer of water […]