Clean water is life’s most important and basic necessity. Although 72% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, it is not fit for human consumption directly without purification. Purification of impure water is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Access to clean water is becoming an issue in many parts of the world, but a new invention by a team of researchers at Alexandria University in Egypt could change that.
This invention is inexpensive to deploy and therefore looks very promising. They have used a desalination technique called pervaporation. Specially made synthetic membranes are used to filter out large salt particles and impurities so they can be evaporated away, and then the rest is heated up, vapourised, and condensed back into clean water.
Some of the merits of this technology is that the synthetic membranes used, can be made in any lab using cheap materials that are available locally. The vaporisation process doesn’t require any electricity making it inexpensive and suitable for areas without a regular power supply – factors that may affect their employability in developing countries. Additionally, the technique not only desalinates the seawater, but it’s also capable of removing sewage and dirt from it.
The researchers combined expertise in oceanography, chemical engineering, agricultural engineering and biosystems engineering to come up with the solution, and their work has now been published in the journal Water Science and Technology.
“The technology implemented in the study is much better than reverse osmosis, the technology currently used in Egypt and most of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa,” Helmy El-Zanfaly, a professor of water contamination at Egypt’s National Research Centre, told Scidev.net. “It can effectively desalinate water with high concentration of salt like that of the Red Sea, where desalination costs more and yields less.”
Scientists are hoping to do a pilot test with this technology and prove that their theories are correct when applied on a large scale. There is also a big question right now, on how to tackle the waste generated from the purification.
Scarcity of clean water is one of the biggest problems the world is facing right now and scientists across the globe are working tirelessly, to come up with new water purification techniques to eliminate the problem. According to Water.org, some 750 million people across the globe don’t have access to clean drinking water, a problem that’s responsible for around 8, 40,000 deaths every year – more than the entire population of San Francisco.
If this technology works, it will have a huge impact on millions of people!
Source: Science Alert
