Why Aren't Desalination Plants EVERYWHERE?

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We recently learned that Light, evaporates water 4 times faster than Heat... at the same energy level.

California does not have a water problem. It has lots of water, but it is poorly managed. Your idea of using excess solar power for desalination and moving that water into reservoirs is brilliant. That’s water management! Bravo!!

It's hard to compete against the free and abundant energy of the sun.

Atmospheric Water Generation, basically treating air conditioner/dehumidifier condensate to potable quality, is another important fresh water solution. This can also be solar powered and in complementary usage with desalination for inland areas remote from oceans and fresh water sources.

I alsways thought it was hard to desalinate water because salt "stuck" to water too much, LOL. Great insight! So, it turned out to be entropy... it's always entropy! Thanks!

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. My wish is that states with coastlines would invest in fresh water.

Ok I never thought about using a humidifier for the purpose of creating humidity so it would need filtering again. I wonder if a dehumidifier with a filter would do the job. I bought a small tabletop dehumidifier to run while its so hot and the A.C just can't pull enough out of the air. I got 2 cups of water this morning while running overnight. I think people are over looking the power of a dehumidifier to make temperatures more comfortable. 80 degrees with 80% humidity is like being in a soup pot but with less humidity its perfectly comfortable. I hope the portable solar market becomes more affordable since it has the power to save lives!

One thing I loved about this experience was using the atomizer and proving that it's a fundamentally different process from evaporation. Here, you literally break down the salt water solution into tiny droplets that are carried by convection currents or another mechanism, whereas in evaporation, you take out water molecules one by one into the gas phase, so there's no way they'll carry the salt with them. You literally need a cage of water molecules to surround each sodium and chloride ion in the solution, and also, you can't take one out without the other because you'd end up with a charged particle in gaseous phase, which wouldn't make it one millimeter above the water without being attracted by the opposing negative charge they leave behind.

A couple things. First, if you're going to desalinate water, you should try to use fractional distillation to isolate useful chemicals. There's a lot of metals and minerals that could be used for making batteries. The second thing is A lot of industrial distillation uses vapor compression. You basically have a fan on the outlet that sucks the vapor out and compresses it, cooling off the vapor in the saltwater. That requires a little bit of electricity, but you could probably do that with a small fan and a pipe. That helps you to reuse some of The solar heat but also reduces the pressure in the evaporation vessel. The lower the pressure, the lower the boiling point. And even if you don't reduce the pressure by much, it's still a reduction in boiling point by a little. You could probably do that with a computer fan and some PVC pipe.

Why hasn't someone combined sand batteries and desalination? It seems like a no-brainer to capture solar heat and use it to evaporate seawater. No moving parts, No electricity needed and the salty brine left over, could be refined to be used in molten salt reactors.

Don't forget that the other end product is an extremely salty brine that is quite poisonous if just dumped back in the ocean en masse. Worth careful planning.

there is actually another low energy method of desalination called "freeze-thaw desalination". Mostly used in chemistry lab setting to purify water from contamination. But works for salt too. It rely on the principle as ice crystal form, it actually push out impurity out of the ice structure. Assuming the freezing rate is no so fast that ice end up forming around the impurity, by freezing, remove the salty water, thawing and refreezing. It purify the water by ice's natural tendency to only form crystal structure around other ice crystal. One of the main reason why this method is less energy intensive than thermal desalination. One is heat of fusion for water is much smaller than heat of vaporization (334 J/g vs 2260 J/g), so it cost much less energy than boiling water to create equivalent unit of "pure water". Which is also another reason why arctic iceberg is biggest source of fresh water. Unlike reverse osmosis, eventually its membrane get clogged up. And the membrane need to be maintain and clean. Free-thaw-desalination don't have a membrane to maintain. Energy cost wise, theoretically freeze-thaw desalination suppose to be less than reverse osmosis. But real lab engineering result haven't be able to realize that efficiency yet. Operation wise, since freezing work more energy efficient when environmental temperature is cold, this mean at night time when energy price is at its lowest, FTD can operate at its most efficient rate. Double energy bonus right there. Now come the downside, the rate of freezing is very slow, and you cant freeze too fast either or ice crystal will end up entrap the pollutant. And lack of convection mechanism to transfer heat away mean even though ice have better thermal conductivity than water, it end up being more insulating and slowing down the production rate. So there are two factors limiting production rate and prevent large scale production. Although there are some new research that use pressure to freeze and thaw ice by shifting ice between solid and liquid in the 3 phase diagram. It's suppose to be more energy efficient and faster than just regular freezing. Since you can compress the icy water to help it maintain liquid phase to gain that convection thermal conductivity to get to lower temperature. Then slowly decompress the icy water to form ice. Then keep compress and decompress to maintain the free-thaw purification cycle. As oppose to regular heat pump cycle where heat transfer rate slow dramatically once you enter ice phase. The pressure freeze thaw cycle is faster and less energy intensive per cycle once you get to desired pressure region. Since you only cycle between two very close by pressure states. Plenty of engineering issues still need to be solved. But theoretically it's suppose to be most energy efficient method.

Full video on large scale Sun heat trapping please.

Ultrasonic thingy does not evaporates water, it merely breaks it up into tiny droplets. Remember, water vapor is transparent. The fog you see above boiling water is already condensed vapor.

thank goodness for the desalination at camp lemonnier in djibouti, africa, when i was deployed. a miracle technology but damn expensive and hogged fuel like a tanker aircraft every day hundreds of gallons of fuel to produce it. i was never dehydrated and ironically tasted like from a fresh mountain spring.

Desalination will always be hard because of thermodynamics, but as a viewer in our light desalination video pointed out, if we can find ways to make the process faster and diversify the energy input, we can get more fresh water along with other benefits.

For desalination, the devil in in the details. You want to make sure the intake doesn't suck up aquatic life but the most important part is making sure the waste brine goes in the right place with the proper blending and mixing energy.

You were "just" in Panama. That's what my kids laugh at me about. "Oh, he just died" I said two years ago about Oliver Sacks who had died in 2016. It's been raining heavily in Panama for a few weeks now. Granted, your "just" isn't as bad as mine but still... 🤣

In Sydney the desalinisation plants work when electricity is cheap in the evening and night time. Essentially it is used ot level to level the energy grid at the same tiem as producing water.