Problem: Shortage of clean, non-salt water in the world. Dependance on oil, makes energy costs higher. Current desalination methods are extremely expensive with high long-term and short-term costs. Solution: Create a desalination process that also produces energy to reduce long-term costs. (High short-term costs as well). An idea for water desalination would be to combine solar panels (dark colors), and a dome or box style giant (over 50 feet diameter, maybe even 300 feet)... container for evaporating/separating water from the salts/solvents. To intensify the evaporation, this can be done in two ways: 1st. dark solar panels, this will help produce energy that can lower the costs of desalination. The dark colors will make the panels more efficient but also help evaporate the water by attracting heat/light. 2nd. Just like a "survival water kit when stranded in the ocean", trapped water in a container evaporates and collects at the ceiling/roof of a container. The evaporated water from the hot panels would collect at the roof. A device would be needed to collect the water droplets. This could be done in several ways. One method might be to create the dome/structure like a giant rice cooker with a panel in the middle with wholes to allow water to evaporate through, but then pool up as well. another idea would be to have a glass cone to allow solar/heat/sun or energy through... however the evaporated would evaporate through the center of the cone... then collect on the roof... when it drops the water would move to the edges of the cone. If this doesn't make sense, let me try a different way of saying it... layer 1: solar panels (if not, at least dark panels)..... water is sent on top of this layer (glass can be used to reduce condensation on electrical components, as a separate layer). layer 2: cone begins... the base will be fat on the bottom, and a hole at the top like a tepee. layer 3: a ceiling to collect water (a slant or slight dome might help move water to the sides where it can collect) the tepee structure will pool the water in the structure on its sides, so that the water does not drop back inside the whole or evaporation spout (top of tepee). A different option would be to make the whole very small so that water does not go back inside... additional support: entrance tubes (intake) to flow water into the structure. Then exit tubes to drain clean water out, pumped using the solar panels. salt water pumped in, desalinized water pumped out. Ideas to improve efficiency: could we make magnifying glass structures on the roof to intensify the heat, or would this reduce efficiency? could we surround the structure with solar mirrors to increase the solar energy, speeding up the evaporation process? another idea: for countries with coal energy plants, they could cool machines with salt water, then sell the desalinized water that is evaporated from the cooling process. please leave any other feedback ideas!
They just released on the news yesterday (or the day before) that we'll be getting another de-salination plant here in Western Australia. The problem with the plants we currently use is that they emit a hell of a lot of C02 from the processing of the water. Your idea would work of course. Wether it would work well or not is a different matter. De-salination is an expensive idea and governments have to think weigh up the cost factor when compared to how much usable water is it going to produce at the cost of how much wastage and emissions. Sometimes it's a better idea to tap into natural water tables...often it's not. This is the exact reason we're getting another plant...at the cost of $30 per person, per year as well as the $10,000,000+ wasted on the project they scrapped in order to start work on the plant. De-salination is definitely a good idea...just not always the best one. EDIT: Also, in regards to your diagram. The design isn't very efficient when you consider it's got a bottleneck effect for the evaporating moisture. A lot of vapour is just going to condense before it gets through the bottleneck and then run back into the salt water. You could make it many times more efficient by removing the bottleneck feature.
Jroe52, A good magazine to look through for information on this sort of thing is: Mother Earth News http://www.motherearthnews.com/ always a good read for those who are interested in self sufficiency. Often times you can find them at your library or university. Additionally the sketch you've provided above is the basic system that they teach for ocean survival when shipwrecked etc. It's something that can be rigged up relatively easily. I've seen it illustrated in more than one book on survival.
I've actually started thinking about this idea after seeing the movie Sahara. I like the idea of using mirrors to collect the sollar energy.
One project the DEA is working on out here in The Marshall Islands is to sink a pipe/tube like 2000 feet under the ocean, across the islands and then another exit pipe out the other side in the water. Then in the middle they have a large generator that sucks up the ice cold water, exposes the middle section (several hundred feet) to the hot humid air, and there is a collector to get all the condensed water off the sides of the pipe. Its really quite efficient and produces a huge amount of fresh water since its so blasted humid out here. So far it looks quite promising.
adouglasmor where did you find the pictures? thanks everyone for your replies. i think its amazing how people who never talked or read eachothers stuff come up with the same ideas hehe. i wrote this response on a different site, but it has nothing to do with your posts because it was replying to different people lol: (hardforum.com) *********** think small scale though... lets say you live in a desert, all you can afford is a pool, to hold water lets say 18feet in diameter. your country cannot depend on oil, and you need water and energy. so you could make a mini-solar panel system, that produces energy while also heating up water (by attracting sunlight to the dark colors, it slowly heats up the water while also providing electricity). this could be intensified with mirrors to increase solar power, but could the mirrors also increase the solar heat/energy for evaporation? since your in a desert, it will get cold at night, which might help condensation... however during most months during the day time it may be extremely hot, 70-110 degrees 6-12 months a year (arizona, nevada, middle east, parts of australia and china)... don't think like americans. our las vegas americans are extremely lucky to have clean, fresh water. someday they will not be so lucky and will need to make major lifestyle changes when they run low on water. we will, with rising ocean levels however have an abundance of ocean water. ok... so this might not be a good idea for supporting a community. but on a household scale it might provide people with enough water to get the basic necessety water for survival (8 cups x family 4)... maybe even enough to cook with or bath once in a while. in america we don't face these problems, but many countries do. would the cost of materials be cheaper? i'm not sure. but this might be alot cheaper then the current and extremely expensive methods for water desalination which probably give most of the water to those who can afford it. maybe i should make a mini model to test it? maybe a portable solar dome wouldn't be a bad idea either.... for survival purposes (electricity plus clean water is handy). for some reason this all reminds me of star wars... "but i want to go to mos eisely" lol
just an idea... would adding charcoil to the dirty water help attract more sunlight, or is it better to simply use dark solar panels? what can all be done to intensify the sun light? my list so far: mirrors dark colors magnifying glass windows... i was thinking, mirrors could point towards the structure to add heat. dark colors we know how they function... but could we make windows that magnify sunlight, or would they simply be pointless as the sun rotates (meaning, they will no longer be magnifying but could actually be reducing heat/sun waves)... anyone ever see the mini-mirror laser? where guys took like 100 2-4" mirrors and made them into a death-star-ray style laser? we could build like 10 of these too to intensify heat...
Wow, my Dad used to get that magazine when I was a kid. That one and Foxfire or firefox or somethin like that. Dad was a hippie art teacher/potter. he used to get mad at me when I wore my fav T-Shirt. It was flouresent green had a picture of a Nuclear Power plant on it, the caption at the bottom said "A Little Nukie Never Hurt Anyone!"
Dark things don't "attract sunlight". They heat up more than reflective things because they absorb the incoming light, heat up, and then radiate out a black body spectrum. Things that aren't black reflect the incoming light back, so the energy from the incoming light isn't converted into heat. Either way, you're dealing with the same amount of light, though. Only the amount that is converted into heat changes. I'm not sure that you could make a black solar panel, or at least, not a very efficient one. Whatever energy is converted into heat can't be used for electricity. The more sunlight is changed into heat, the less actual current you'll produce. A magnifying glass won't help. Magnifying glasses redistribute the light that hits the glass. They don't attract more light. You're not going to get any more light than the total flux passing through the glass in the first place. Now, if you have a really large lens, you could use it to focus more light into the water than you normally would, but I'm not sure how practical it would be to have a really large lens on the thing. I think you should pick up a book on optics. Maybe "Optics" by Eugene Hecht. It's a crummy book, but it's the only one I know. Magnification doesn't depend on the incoming angle (well, it does, but it won't suddenly invert when light comes in from and angle). Regardless, you don't want magnification, anyway. You want the lens to be set up so that it "shrinks" all of the incoming light into a smaller area. The whole point of these things is to gather light from a large area and put it into a small area. Just keep in mind we're not magically "intensifying heat" or anything. We're gathering light from a large area and putting it into a small area.
Yeah that mag is good. Many of the ideas are not really all that workable for people who live in a city... but some are. I've got several little projects going in my garden at the moment based on ideas out of that mag. My mom who lives in a more rural area has used much of that stuff everyday for the last 20 years. Fascinating what can be done in terms of self reliance. Sadly the way society is heading.. it's all about reliance on the corporations. Products have planned obsolescence in order to drive profit margins for big corporations. Very little can be repaired these days... well it could... if you could get the parts... which in most cases you can't. Stuff is made to be replaced not repaired anymore. Drives me angry.:bang: as for the t-****... LOL!!! I've got a similar situation... my mom who worked for law enforcement for many years and is pro gun ownership wasn't very ammused when I had a t-shirt that proclaimed: I support the right to arm bears!
Hey, parts of Florida are already in near drought conditions even with the regular storms. Salt water is beginning to seep into the underground aquifer. It was on the news last night.
is that a bad thing.. i mean ... i have been thinking of this. i live in sussex wisconsin, in waukesha county. our dumbass adults keep using tons of water even though our region which use to have tons of water, is now going to have a water crisis within five years. where i live we have two aquafers, a lower and higher aquafer. the higher aquafer which has been here for millions of years, has been 100% used up in the last 15 years! freaking crazy. this has caused our towns in the county to dig deeper into the lower aquafer which has cancerous metals. our water bill says "do not drink the water, it contains 3x the legal amount of radon", freaking radon! probably why my body always aches lol from when i lived there as a kid, now i get to drink good old poop filled lake michigan water. anyways.. i have been thinking... if these aquafirs come from the age where this part of my country was undersea, were they not salt water at one time? maybe it is earths natural cleaning process for some water, where we could fill them back up with salt water... let it settle then use it again. that might help. to be honest, my community needs to stop watering their lawns and grow vegitation on their lawns that promote healthier water and less runoff. however my parents and their generation are gun ho americans "nobody can tell me what to do on my property" is the current solution. so our dumbass community is going to be drinking cancer and then living without water within a few years. however, we are left of a fault line, so we cannot steal lake michigan water due to a treaty with other states and canada. sometimes americans need to be pooped on before realizing, hay we have a problem ahead!
