Water Scarcity
Freshwater from salt water using only solar energy
Modular, off-grid desalination technology could supply families, towns
This scaled-up test bed of NEWT’ s direct solar desalination technology uses carbon black nanoparticles that convert as much as 80 percent of sunlight energy into heat. Results from an earlier prototype showed the technology could produce as much as six liters of freshwater per hour per square meter of solar membrane. Credit: Jeff Fitlow / Rice University
A federally funded research effort to revolutionize water treatment has yielded an off-grid technology that uses energy from sunlight alone to turn salt water into fresh drinking water. The desalination system, which uses a combination of membrane distillation technology and light-harvesting nanophotonics, is the first major innovation from the Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment( NEWT), a multi-institutional engineering research center based at Rice University. NEWT’ s“ nanophotonics-enabled solar membrane distillation” technology, or NESMD, combines triedand-true water treatment methods with cuttingedge nanotechnology that converts sunlight to heat. The technology is described online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More than 18,000 desalination plants operate in 150 countries, but NEWT’ s desalination technology is unlike any other used today.
“ Direct solar desalination could be a game changer for some of the estimated 1 billion people who lack access to clean drinking water,” said Rice scientist and water treatment expert Qilin Li, a corresponding author on the study.“ This off-grid technology is capable of providing sufficient clean water for family use in a compact footprint, and it can be scaled up to provide water for larger communities.” The oldest method for making freshwater from salt water is distillation. Salt water is boiled, and the steam is captured and run through a condensing coil. Distillation has been used for centuries, but it requires complex infrastructure and is energy inefficient due to the amount of heat required to boil water and produce steam. More than half the cost of operating a water distillation plant is for energy.
An emerging technology for desalination is membrane distillation, where hot salt water is flowed across one side of a porous membrane and cold freshwater is flowed across the other. Water vapor is naturally drawn through the membrane from the hot to the cold side, and because the seawater need not be boiled, the energy requirements are less than they would be for traditional distillation. However, the energy costs are still significant because heat is continuously lost from the hot side of the membrane to the cold.
“ Unlike traditional membrane distillation, NESMD benefits from increasing efficiency with scale,” said Rice’ s Naomi Halas, a corresponding author on the paper and the leader of NEWT’ s nanophotonics research efforts.“ It requires minimal pumping energy for optimal distillate conversion, and there are a number of ways we can further optimize the technology to make it more productive and efficient.”
NEWT’ s new technology builds upon research in Halas’ lab to create engineered nanoparticles that harvest as much as 80 percent of sunlight to generate steam. By adding low-cost, commercially available nanoparticles to a porous membrane, NEWT has essentially turned the membrane itself into a one-sided heating element that alone heats the water to drive membrane distillation.
“ The integration of photothermal heating capabilities within a water purification membrane for direct, solardriven desalination opens new opportunities in water purification,” said Yale University‘ s Menachem“ Meny” Elimelech, a co-author of the new study and NEWT’ s lead researcher for membrane processes.
In the PNAS study, researchers offered proof-of-concept results based on tests with an NESMD chamber about the size of three postage stamps and just a few millimeters thick. The distillation membrane in the chamber contained a specially designed top layer of carbon black
30 Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • July- August 2017