Unlimited Fresh Water: Can MIT's Breakthrough Save Us?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 พ.ค. 2024
- Sleep is unbelievably important, so make sure yours is the best with Eight Sleep! Use my link www.eightsleep.com/ziroth or code 'Ziroth' for $200 off!
This video is an exploration into a resent rabbit hole I went down. I read about MIT's new desalination breakthrough on Reddit, and needed to learn more! The topic of desalination is an important one that is only becoming more critical and could be a lifeline for huge area of the world. As well as looking at the breakthrough, this video also touches on classical methods (multi-stage distillation and reverse osmosis) and a case study of where this could be used, Kiribati.
Credits:
Producer: Ryan Hughes
Research: Sian Buckley and Ryan Hughes
Video Editing: @aniokukade and Ryan Hughes
Music: Joris Šimaitis
/// Key Sources ///
Breakthrough:
news.mit.edu/2023/desalinatio...
www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S...
Kiribati Lenses:
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
IPCC Report:
www.un.org/en/climatechange/s...
Salt Water Brine Issues:
Jones et al. The state of desalination and brine production: A global outlook
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:10 Standard Desalination
2:56 Case Study
6:20 Problems to Solve
8:49 MIT System (Inspiration)
10:10 MIT System (Operation)
#engineering #desalination #breakthrough - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Sleep is unbelievably important, so make sure yours is the best with Eight Sleep! Use my link www.eightsleep.com/ziroth or code 'Ziroth' for $200 / £200 off!
If you see any other interesting engineering projects that you want me to make a video on, please let me know. This one was really interesting to explore!
copycat of clay filters with hidrophobic leaves and wood. USE BACTERIA MEMBRANES
We pay $5 at the servo for 500ml, have big water offset it
We pay $5 at the servo for 500ml, have big water offset it
We pay $5 at the servo for 500ml, have big water offset it
AEROSPACE ENGNEER here: When I first saw the title of the video I was very sceptical considering some of the ridiculous claims made by other solar powered systems. Thunderf00t has debunked at least 1 of those.
But this looks damn interesting and a genuine breakthrough.
Because I work in industrial control systems and automation AND have worked in mining where they do a lot of water treatment I have worked on both RO and Multi-effect systems although the MES system I encountered was called a Mechanical Vapour Compression system.
One thing people misunderstand with RO is that its NOT that cheap and its often compared to more expensive options. Its biggest advantage is that you can turn it off and on quite easily.
With MES systems they are tricky to get started and you just can't turn them off and back on. One of the effects they use is to keep the system under vacuum because you can get the water to boil at around 70℃. I think the limit is about 67-68℃. One they are running and stable they use very little power because of the thermal exchanges going on. *BUT* those systems have 1 major drawback - they only operate over a very narrow range of flow rates. So you turn them on and cross your fingers they will start as expected.
The best analogy I have is that MES systems are like a 2 stroke motorcycle.
When they are on song in their happy place they are brilliant.
When they are not happy and off song they are horrible.
And if you're wondering why and aerospace engineer is interested in water treatment. Ask what would be one of the first items of critical infrastructure for a moon base.
It’s crazy how desalination is a problem financially, but maintaining wars around the world is perfectly within our budget.
"our"
@@newolde1 You care to elaborate? Or just repeat the word you recognize?
@@CertifiedSkankno, he's right
WE (America + the west in my case) did not cause Russia to invade Ukraine, tell Venezuela to prepare to invade Guyana, or restart tensions between Ethiopia and its neighbors. The wealth and power isn't quite that overconcentrated (yet), not that it would necessarily guarantee a solution if it was because we live mostly in democracies and not ecofascist states (for now).
Tell that to merica
@@user-nc1vk4te6p America the people ? Or America the government ? It’s important to distinguish.
The hyper-salinity issue isn't down to the method used, but the amount you use it. It's the same amount of salt left over that has to be returned to the ocean. Yes, the trick is to dilute it rather than dump it highly concentrated in one big go, and doing this where there are natural ocean currents to circulate it will give the best results.
Spot on.
NO They should be turning the Brine into Salt Battery Storage Units...
@@Shivaho or we could both
Or dump it into ponds to recover the salt.
why not sell the salt
@Ziroth As a kid I tried making a clear dome with reflective sides that focused sunlight onto a floating hot-plate which was washed by wave action to clear the salt residue. I was soundly discouraged by people that knew what they were talking about. I also thought that with cunning alternating reflective and non-reflective tubing the water vapour could be transported a considerable distance from the coast, then at the journey's zenith, allowed to precipitate and flow to a reservoir. This episode rekindled all that happy philosophising. Thank you.
Those people didn’t know what they were talking about don’t listen to those people anymore if you still are
11:42 if you want to find out how it works. This guy really tried my patience with his preamble.
You're not the only one. Really more like 10:10 where it starts but talks so slow and meanders a bit painful.
@@SpaceDeviant Not to mention his accent 😞
Ha! I didn't make it that far, not even close. Did he start with "Water is essential to all life on earth?" I blocked out the memory. Thanks for the time stamp. I'll start there.
I found his explanations of the problem and current solutions helpful in understanding why this new method is a potential breakthrough. Watched from the beginning to the end! I also rather liked his accent.
Videos like thus don't start addressing their main topic until after the first ten minutes is done for the sole reason of helping their youtube algorithm. Resulting in more monetary pay out for the youtube channel.
This would be great for off shore sailboats and motor boats which use "water makers" to produce fresh water. These units are reverse osmosis devices but they use a lot of power which is a problem for boats running on solar.
@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5 Do you understand just how rude it is to intrude with your preaching? You are far more likely to turn off more people than you are to save any souls with your off-topic bible quotes. Do you actually want to drive people into the arms of the Adversary?
Unless the "gravity feed" part of this can be changed to pump driven, my guess is this wohld not be good for boats, due to their constant motion. Even when at anchor, they rock due to wave motion.
@@2jlee wouldn't a gimbal also solve this issue ?
I'm guessing that the process described in this video requires an immense amount of horizontal space to gather enough energy to make the process work, and a pretty significant amount of vertical space to create significant temperature differences to cause the water to move quickly enough to distill the desired amount of water. I suspect that a thermodynamic conservation of energy is present here that if you compare the usual osmosis driven system to this or any other distillation system, the amount of energy required to run the system and produce clean water is the same but because the osmosis system uses an external source of energy to pressurize, it works faster to produce the same amount of water.
And Riverboat Casinos Too
I live in Kiribati and I was on Banaba during the drought
And we are are tying to facilitate a small drill rig for simple wells;
Love your article, accurate, too.
The question is : when will it be available ?
Unless the idea is patented or even if it is, the terms may be easy enough (or not) for anyone to create their own system although as the article describes may require some experimentation and adjustment.
I'm wondering though if the complicated design can't be simplified to an enclosed single box with at least one if not more artificial floors within and eliminate the hydrophobic membrane. The result is creating a microcosm of an ocean or any deep body of water in which the water surface is super heated due to its shallowness and evaporates/distills while the depth naturally circulates sending brine to the bottom and bringing up new source water for evaporation.
The current oceans work this way, although there is no artificial floor that separates the surface from below, it's well known that light penetrates the ocean's surface only down to about 30' and the surface environment fish like is only down to about 12', creating these different levels or strata naturally.
Thank you for your well researched, accurate video, and kind reply. I think it is rather complicated to source materials to experiment as every bit comes from overseas. When this broke last year I collected the academic papers. Too.
There are some solar style ones that looks like a solar panel 3.5 x 7.5 feet using a small stream for thin film over black hot backing, under clear 6 mil plastic They produce 18 lts/ day under ideal conditions and though there is a retail price of Aud$750 they can be copied.
We have two large capacity RO units being built by New Zealanders to serve the needs for the 64,000 people of South Tarawa. But they will need lots of Power to run them.
Banaba has a water lens, and based off wells on Nauru we should be able to facilitate the drilling of 3” bore holes with hand or solar pumps. The drill rigs (US$15,000 from China) are the size of a compact car with a little derrick , plus a large air compressor on a trailer.
I think this is good direction if only as a back up as after the drought Aid had provided for some more RO units, but will not last long due to qualified maintenance.
Thank You, I subscribed.
@@tonysu8860
Thank you for your kind words! It's always hard to know the timeline of research to implementation - but with the media attention on this I would hope funding pots would be open to take this to the next level. Potentially a spin-off from the universities will put this into action in the next few years!
Ask ccb envico
@@tonysu8860I would think that absent having a tank that is actually 30+ feet deep so the water physically blocks sunlight from penetrating deeper, you'd need an artificial barrier to attenuate sunlight.
I think MAYBE it could be possible to create a polarized lens that is porous enough for water turnover, but making it porous enough for that might defeat the efficacy of polarization and thus prove insufficient to stop sunlight penetrating.
I did a Project for my High school science class(which was 30 years ago) and all i used was 2 glass bottles 1 painted Black and the othe clear. I place the black one lower then the clear bottle and placed the clear bottle in the shade and the black bottle im the sun and connected them with a tube. The water in the black bottle was heated and water vapors evaporated and collected in the cooler clear glass bottle. I used nothing more them 2 glass bottles, some black paint, a small piece of tubing, some salt water and the Sun shining above us.
Very cool, well done! 🫡
How much fresh water did you manage to produce in an hour? 🤔
@@johnnybuetiprobably not much, but the idea is still great! imagine it scaled up :)
@@johnnybueti It's better to just collect water from the rain
@@rwyo83 I agree you'll get more from rainwater. However, if this method only produces a couple liters a day, it's still a couple more liters than you would have had otherwise ... which might be really useful if rain isn't falling as much as you'd like.
8 minutes into the video and i still don't have any idea how this MIT technology works
Hear you interestingthough.
Your low attention span is embarrassing, watch the video and you’ll know how it works
it filter the vapor heated by the sun only so the salty water continue to circulate outside
If it sounds confusing or vague it’s by intention. If there was anything in the scheme of value it would be clear as crystal.
since yall are too silly and have been failed by this education system (not your fault) skip to 11:30 for the MIT idea
edit: as @javierititin mentions Ziroth does mention the original work around 11:10 and I failed to pick that up. Original comment left for history as I still feel the focus should have been on the advancements over the years vs just the promises made in 2019/2020:
It's been nearly 4 years since they released that paper. I was hoping for more up to date information than what came out in 2020.
2020 was 4 years ago. wow
because it is crap
Video is garbage. Ryan there (I guess it's Ryan) FAILS to explain that this is a followup to that 2020 paper and that the whole point is in using multiple stages and convection circulation.
Instead, he twaddles for 95% of the video about ancient Romans, water "lenses" sleep SPONSORS and whatnot. Garbage.
Cell link is useful, if you have the time to read it. Mit link isn't - it fails to read and interpret the study properly.
E.g. Amount of water desalinated is said to be 5 liters per square meter per hour - when that's the value for basically 0% of salt in water. At 20% (percentage by weight, 26.3% would be saturation point for NaCl) the amount of fresh water is 1.78 liters per square meter per hour.
Still a lot to achieve without salt accumulation on the membrane but it indicates that folks at mit.edu don't really get the study and don't bother reading through it properly.
@@dennisk648 Probably, but a new video about an old subject should have new information, even if that information is "it's been years and they still can't improve the efficiency or bring down the cost of the device. It hasn't moved anywhere near production."
The problem with desal is energetics. Fresh water will move into areas of higher salt concentration. This is mostly how trees pull water from their roots to their leaves.
We had an experimental desalination project on town land near the shore. It used only solar to evaporate and distill seawater from a shallow black polymer lined ponds. I never did learn the results or prospects from the project. It lasted about four years.
Where was this so people can look it up and learn?
probably wasn't cost effective and was a poor producer. nuke power should be used in conjuction with desal.
Seems like it would be using a lot of land. Heating water in shallow (less than an inch) glass covered black trays works well. Problem in England is that for 6 months the sun is too low and bounces off the horizontal glass/polycarbonate cover. Polythene sheeting is much cheaper and easier to handle than glass, think in India there are groundwater issues in places. Heat the water with a clear polythene cover, and condense it for drinking on stainless steel? Need to keep this cool. All about humidity, relative humidity, temperature and condensation point.
@@reltech Yes, polythene sheet on an incline over basins. Like I said, experimental. There were i think 4 such constructions, about 20' x 40 ' each. Galvanized pipe frames. It was about 30 years ago. No attempt at drinking, just testing the feasibility. Eventually they fell into disrepair. It was in the paper when it began but I recall seeing no follow-up or results. Obviously monitoring for bacteria and salinity would be required if use was intended.
No reason it wouldn't work, but it probably wouldn't produce enough for large scale use, being passive and relying only on sunlight. Perhaps in mid-latitude arid regions it might be practical for small communities.
@@keekaleikai lol...how wrong can you be in one so few words.
Lots of ideas work in the lab under controlled conditions. Scaling it up for real world usage is the roadblock. Usually cost and or reliability/maintenance prevents it's adoption.
But not always.
did you understand how they remove the salt? this whole thing sounds good to be true. someone explain how they flush salt away without physical maintenance or pumps?
@@cubertmiso4140I vaguely understand the ideas behind this device. Beyond me to say yes or no.But it will be just an oddity if it is not capable of working in the real world.
Massive red flag that they are quoting prices lower than tap water. The cost of tap water also includes the huge amount of effort that goes into getting it into your house in a safe condition (though I understand in certain parts of America that's not the case - Flint, Michigan for example).
Very easy to just desalinate a litre of water and say "look, that costs less than tap water", but one is sitting in a jug in the lab and the other is flowing out of your tap.
@@cubertmiso4140 Most scientific breakthroughs are achieved by manipulating natural phenomenon. This is why he was talking about currents, and how the salt itself affects movement in the water which is what clears the membrane... (@9:00 - 10:00). It does sound a bit too good to be true, but that's the 'science' behind.
This is really a fantastic breakthrough applying modalities in thermodynamics, hydrology, biochemistry and engineering. I’m excited to see if the suitcase desalinators will work for this island nation. I hadn’t heard of this island nation, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for further news. Great show ❤️
Great research results! Maybe the same method could be used to avoid clogging in flow batteries, too?
Great thought
@@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5god doesn’t exist.
@@darrenh669 you're replying to a bot that posts this comment on every video, completely out of context, seen it before
@@darrenh669 If God doesn't exist then why do bananas fit in our hands so perfectly?
@@SillyNolan Same reason your penis fits your hands so perfectly. It's meant to be.
Video starts at 8.55
Thank you 🙌
?
@@DavidRYates-tk2tq title related content
Back in early 80s my idea was something else:
Build big cone higher than 12 meters above the sea surface (make it 15, for example), with the open bottom dipped in the sea.
Conical shape should allow the remaining salt to fall back to the sea, so, the inner surface of the cone might be covered with Teflon.
At the top of the cone vacuum pump would pull the vapor out, and push it through pressurized pipe system down.
The valve at the exit of the pipe would keep the pressure inside and condense the vapor, raising its temperature with the pressure.
The pipe would be spiral, long, and integrated into the cone wall to give the heat back to the water inside the cone.
Building the cone is more expensive, but it completely removes the need for the expensive membranes, which should all together be cheaper in the long run.
Sounds a bit overly complicated, but it is effectively what they are doing here as well. Use solar heating to evaporate the water, collect the evaporate, use seawater to condense evaporate.
Which makes me wonder why no one has done it before.
if you're always dumping the salt and wastes back into the ocean you increase the concentration. if enough places do this long enough it'll make the ocean super concentrated killing most sea life.
Spreading out the waste sea water dumps around the coastline should mitigate that.
Maintaining a low constant outflow rate, the sea water should mix quite quickly I assume.
@@Khanstant Mate, that is what the rivers ARE currently doing and HAVE been doing for hundreds of millions of years.
I haven't run the numbers, but i doubt it is going to be a problem ANY time soon.
fun fact; with the salty water you can build rechargeable Batteries
The Ekman Effect also drives both underwater and surface currents which then drive the water and dissipate any hyper salinity in the region. Desalination is a good solution for coastal regions but for inland/landlocked regions we need to harvest rainwater by sequestering it through deep bore wells to recharge the ground water table.
except . . . fracking makes groundwater toxic
@@cleanitup_pls7893yes fracking is the worst type of fuel extraction. It requires at least five times more water and destroys the habitat
I like to picture the desalination plants along the coasts and pipelines running inland to areas of need, including natural/wild areas. Just think, when they leak, all we get is more grass. Sigh. Of course, flooding could be an issue, but I like to also think of shut-off valves and redundant safety systems.
12:25
Modification of an existing technique for harvesting salt from sea water could also provide fresh water using solar energy. With this technique salt is extracted by allowing sea water into ponds, then sealing them off. Over time the water evaporates leaving salt behind.
I envisage having a central pond containing sea water, surrounded by a moat for collecting fresh water, and the whole thing covered with a transparent dome. Energy from the sun evaporates the water in the central pond, which then rises and condenses on the dome, before running down into the moat. Water is extracted from the moat and salt from the pond.
Occasionally the central pond would have to be allowed to dry out completely to allow for salt removal, so more than one setup would be required for continuous production. Due to evaporation rates this method may not provide sufficient water for urban use, but it could be used to gradually turn arid areas into fertile land.
Awesome people behind these significant improvements in the desalination system. Thank you very much.
Thank you for a well made video on such an interesting subject. I just discovered this channel, congratulations, you've just acquired another subscriber.
The sun tracking requirements are not addressed considering the angle of the water cell is fixed however a sun tracking fresnel lens and mirror could provide a reasonable solution for maintaining the light intensity constant during sun transition .
solar evacuated tubes
There is nothing unique about using the sun, could be any heat source and no reason it can't rotate and follow the sun or use lenses.
Why would you bother with the lens if there isn't a temperature minimum and you're bringing in supplemental heat anyways?
Are you aware of the concept of surface area?
@@pupip55 A solar tracking system is almost always more expensive than just buying a second system to double your output.
Unless you manually adjust it to follow the sun, but if you're that desperate for something as basic as water, I don't see you getting your hands on one of these.
@@smolpener7430 Do you have any engineering tips that would help when scaling this model up to a industrial scale?
8:42 For cheaper options, the islanders should use filtered (but still saline) seawater
to bathe and do things with, then rinse briefly with clean water, and keep
the tapwater for drinking purposes or crop watering only.
Bathing with filtered seawater is good for the skin too.
This can reduce the needs from regular water use from 180 liter per person daily need
to as little as 20 liters, even when showering or bathing with the same result.
This would equate 6000 liters for the entire island's needs daily given 300 people.
(besides any crops that is, which can still be watered by rainwater that then needs no filtering.)
6000 liters is a mere 6 m3. That much a single boat could handle.
Well I guess it could be considered, but then you need to run 2 sets of pipes everywhere (fresh and salty) all for a mediocre solution.
A similar happened in Europe where there were two kinds of electricity and it was phased out eventually
In the Galapagos they do this already
@@BIELSIMON If fresh water is a problem, then the solution is either
getting more, or changing the way it is used.
The latter has the most benefit, since it requires a low maintainance
secondary system of pipes, easily implemented on a small scale.
The former is a costly high maintainance water income through desalination.
There are no other solutions, either use less, or gain more, period.
@@AllenKnutson Well, they're smart there then. I'd do the same on a boat.
I think salt makes soap less effective (less foam), but you could rinse off with salt, do a quick rinse with freshwater, lather up with the water off, rinse it off with salt water, then rinse off with fresh water or whatever. I guess the exact details of how to do it, would be determined over time.
However, I get what you mean, anything that can use filtered salt water or filtered salt water with slightly less salt, could be used cheaper for anything that you can get away with using it on, maybe like rinsing out containers or rinsing off dishes before you wash them and so on.
Basically, using the salt water to get some of the initial bulk rinsing done, sort of like rinsing a dirty dish in dirty dish water, where it still comes out dirty, but it's less dirty and stuff is hydrated so it is removed by clean soap and water easier.
Pure brilliance!!! Congratulations to the research teams!
Thank you Ziroth, this is so much better than other tech channels because you address questions that get air brushed, such as what exactly happens to the salt in reverse osmosis. Your insight on Kiribati was phenomenal! Brilliant! The best tech post I've watched.
Incidentally, you're the only TH-camr who can explain why the new Toyota water engine doesn't break the first law of thermodynamics? Can you please explain water engines as brilliantly as you have just explained desalination?
Thank you for covering this breakthrough. I hope it makes it to the next stage of development and can be scaled up. 👍
This was 4 years ago and a scam.
This would only replace the current cost of desalination in those areas that require desalination as the first step in a drinking water treatment process. Unless the membranes in use will also remove other containments (e.g. bacteria, virus, heavy metals, etc...), you will still need to provide some form of treatment to the water to make it potable. Readily accessible sea water from a shallow well could be a good location to source your drinking water, assuming the application is localized to a coastal facility. It would be a less favorable choice to select from a bay or other beach location simply because of the high incidence of bacterial and "trash" polluting the water. I don't see how they arrived at this process being cheaper than U.S. tap water, unless the tap water was sourced from salt water to begin with. At which point you are simply reducing the cost of the desalination process and assuming the rest of the treatment process costs and any distribution costs remain equal.
Probably hyperbole, guys at MIT can't really be that bad at arithmetic. There are places in the US where potable water is simply pumped to the point of use. My farm would be an example. With basic maintenance to the system, we have had a cost of about $1500 for all the water used in the past 60 years. There is an energy cost, but my electric bill runs $6-$7 per month for the entire farm currently, and a bit of that is administrative cost so it is negligible. As for this new device, I suspect you are correct. A biofilm will render it useless in less than a week using raw seawater.
Activated charcoal + sand filters will remove many nasty things including heavy metals
This is an excellent video. Thank you for making it.
They say the system could last several years before requiring replacement parts. I wonder what would give out first, and if larger versions of the system could be designed to be more rugged.
I'm subscribed, but it is taking you a very long time to get to the point and to describe the MIT process !
I still feel that system that isolates the salt itself as a product and not just a waste consideration is in our best interest.
Take a little journey in the energy and human costs of the salt industry around the world rabbit hole too. The boutique salt market could easily provide an additonal income to these places.
Every element in the crust is dissolved in seawater and can be distilled out. Instead of looking at brine as a waste, we should look at it as a fluid mineral to be refined. The salt could be used in sodium-ion batteries, or split into pure sodium and chlorine which have industrial uses; even gold and uranium are dissolved in seawater.
Yes but the problem is that in trying to isolate these we create too much salt and not enough water to be practical. The system reduces the negative effects of the waste while generating what is needed. Solid tech.
@@nobody6715 Spot on. People really need to understand the MASSIVE brine waste that comes from reverse osmosis-- we could extract minerals, sure, but there are several problems. First of all, those minerals aren't locked away in stone, but actively playing a role in the ecosystem we are pulling water from. It's not like regular mining. Not only that, but we would need DECADES for the technology that could make use of the new mineral surplus to scale up. It doesn't exist already, and that takes time. Until then, you're just producing waste, and massive amounts of it every day.
The key to this system is that the water can be relatively safely returned to the sea with some clever thinking. It takes advantage of the fact that when supply is limitless, efficiency is less important. Instead of extracting 70% of the fresh water from one gallon of seawater, just extract 10% of the water from 7 gallons in the same time. Concentrating the salt by 10% makes it safe(r) to add back to the ecosystem where it came from, with a little planning.
@@noahj6727 destroying the ocean slowly instead of quickly. Brilliant. It's no wonder young people hate boomers. We make the job of living harder for future generations.
@@y0nd3r It's not going to destroy the ocean dude, the problem with desalination plants is local not global. Humans don't and won't use anywhere near enough water for it to cause any issues globally. Not to mention the water humans use doesn't just vanish, it evaporates and ends up back in the oceans, so any extra salinity would be re-diluted.
Keep in mind that if freshwater is extracted from salt water in a system that only has an inlet, the salt concentration will increase until the solution can no longer hold the salt at which point it will clog the system unless that saltier solution is taken out via some mechanism like an outlet pipe or other method. One use for an outlet pipe could be a salt production plant but you would need certain amount of land to further evapourate to solid salt and sea ports to allow you to ship it out.
Super interesting! Love the case studies. What an amazing solution!
The question is always, can you scale it up and it still be effective?
Many times things can work fantastic on small scale, while being impractical, insanely high maintenance, very expensive to scale up to provide for a city.
It's like the difference between setting rules for your house and setting rules for a country.
Requiring everyone to clean their room at a certain time and go to bed by a certain time and so on, may be optimum for your home and have you living a near-perfect life, but it can't work for an entire country.
This is the issue many people don't understand when they invent a tiny elegant low power or minimal power, cheap form of solving a problem.
You can get a sheet of plastic and a bucket, a rock, dig a hole, let condensation drip into the bucket or or put a plastic bag around the branch of a tree and collect water.
These are simple, cheap practically free ways to get water, but you can't practically scale this for providing water for a city.
Could you make 100k of these devices and distribute them to 100k households?.. 🤔🤷♂️
I.e. 100k small-scale solutions instead of building 1 big plant?
@@3abxo390 That's actually exactly what happened to electricity production with photovoltaic.
@@3abxo390 I think that's the goal. I don't think they need to scale up this device
@@andrecarvalho9637 It has to be large scale because you need wide area to catch the sunlight. Normal households don't have that. Google: evaporation rate of body of water (for example, how much water evaporate from a pool in a day). It's not much. I assume the system works at 1 atm because it's cheaper to widen the area than to lower the pressure (to increase evaporation rate).
For widespread use in a continental setting, the chief cost of desalination vis a vis other water sources is transporting the water uphill from sea level. Moving large amounts of water is extremely expensive. However, as with energy, we are moving into an economy of scarcity for water. At some future time, energy is likely to become more abundant, as technologies improve, which will mean that the energy cost of transporting desalinated water uphill will become more affordable.
Got a question out of curiosity. Lets say if there is a fund of approximately 1 million USD to solve a nation's water crisis, how would you scale up and apply the desalination model or inspire people to innovate/invest more on this technology?
I hope progress like this continues. Thanks for finding and reporting on this.
I just got back from Fiji, spent time in a village where the young lads spent hours each morning filling 5 gallon containers from their island's only well and humping those a few hundred metres to each hut - no point in making it more efficient with pumps, pipes or even a shaduf - it was essentially a rationing system for a very marginal supply. I did wonder why they didn't have an evaporative system but assumed maintenance etc. deemed them unsuitable eventually.
Ingenious, but still too expensive. In my country (Greece) tap water costs about 0.5 $ per 1,000 liters in the mainland, so a quarter of the cost of this desalination process. However, on small islands, water costs about 2$ per 1,000 liters too, so in that case it is comparable, but only for small islands. In the case of larger islands, it is more cost effective to build a dam or reservoir and collect rainwater. Still, with a lot of sunlight, like here in Greece, it could be a viable alternative.
you cant compare the tap water prices between USA and Greece.
@@deadbeef576 Especially as there is no one price for water in the US. I've been in small towns near springs where it was $10 a month, unlimited. 0.2/1000 liters if you were watering your lawn. I've been in small cities midwest where its 0.8/1000 liters. And then there are places where they water the desert, and its 5x that. In those places I might be interested in this.
While fresh potable water is relatively rare, saline groundwater is much more common. While not a permanent fix, this technology could allow us to extend the life of our aquifers for another few decades. Also, we could build large saline aqua-ducts/canals - allowing seawater to flow into artificial inland seas that we could then purify for local use.
That's happening already. As low lying aquifers are getting depleted and in tandem, sea levels are rising, saltwater intrusion is becoming quite a problem.
That sounds like problems in the waiting. I can easily see salt water contaminating and wrecking havoc on local ecosystems. Normally it's fine if it isn't being tampered with, but drilling and pumping (which will be done for as long as it's operational) is only one major leak away.
Probably best to be extremely cautious with bringing saltwater inland. The last thing you want is that leaking into the groundwater.
Amazing, thank you for talking about it !
Amazing! Thank you for covering this
Islands are the "canary in the coalmine" for all manner of ecological degradation. Glad that MIT and other universities are working on solving such problems, since anything affecting island nations will eventually affect even the wealthiest and most abundant nations.
Fresh water is the most valuable substance in the world.
Can you think of other planets with drinkable water we can explore?
I hope this one pans out, because that would be a miracle technology. You could literally just make a raft that floats offshore and pumps freshwater back… I hope that the hydrophobic membrane isn’t too hard to manufacture, I have no idea what goes into that. I know that there are some exciting new micro-fabrication techniques that can make hydrophobic surfaces, but surely it’s not that complicated if it’s claimed to be that cheap.
Hydrophobic membranes are easy.
Spray silicone waterproofer on a coffee filter for one
Thx for the extended Info about this 👍
I’m not overtly into desalinizations but I love simple elegant ideas, and this is one such. One can argue whether people should be living where there is no water in the first place. (Just because you a does not mean you should). But I can see use for temporary droughts and military for ships and subs where the waste heat from propulsion could power this. Bravo to all who came up with this cleaver development!
Brilliant idea mate. Send them all the monies so they can leave their home nation... not too bright are ya there lil fella.
I'm thinking of an even simpler method consisting of a sluice covered by a dark tarpaulin. The sun heats the water within, condensing on the inner lining and which continuously runs off to a collection gutter. If this recovered water is still brackish it could be run through again on a secondary sluice. A solar-powered pump keeps the flow going from the inlet back to the sea.
Wouldn't something like this work and be very cheap for a small community?
yep but you don''t want the water to be continuously running ideally
Thanks for pronouncing Kiribati correctly 👍
Personally I think it would be nice if we could all just start spelling Kiribati the way it sounds. Kiribas would certainly be one way to go. Not much confusion there. I mean isn't that the way spelling is supposed to work? And yes I know, generally spelling in English is a ridiculous hot mess but still.
Thank you for putting this up.
Given most places like Kiribait are close to ocean level, the average humidity of the air is high... so I'm surprised they're not looking at atmospheric water capture... No need for brine disposal, direct clean water etc... Might be a good area to read up, @Ziroth
Harvesting water from the atmosphere is a very exciting solution for fresh water. There are several new technologies used to accomplish this and it's going to be a workable solution and it is being commercialized already.
Thanks, I'll check it out!
Jeez, do some research on the physics of things - atmospheric water capture is ridiculously energy inefficient - you would need hundreds of square meters of solar panels to run what is essentially a dehumidifier to produce a pathetic amount of water. Thunderfoot has ample videos debunking this crap - the raw physics doesn't work.
@@bsuddzenthe commercialization is the roadblock. Though the output is low, it is a net positive, with nearly zero energy input after manufacture. Sadly most philanthropy efforts focus on wells and traditional desal. Not sure why. There have been alternative methods for centuries. Plus condensation is nearly free, and both low tech and low energy (used in life rafts for example) . I suspect the real issue for these guano island nations, is overpopulation with regard to natural resources coupled with squandering the systems they have been given previously. Sadly the inability to build in a profit margin for new technology means these new low energy methods will sit to the sideline for years until energy costs rise enough to justify their use or innovation makes the cost to produce even lower.
How many people would like air conditioning on this island?
Why not provide air conditioning, and collect the fresh water from the condenser?
It's a two fer.
The issue I see is bio films. Even if you filter the water stuff will get in and grow. The unit will only be hot part if the day and I especially doubt the lower layers are going to sanitize. It will make a nice paper or two but I strongly sense this will fall into the 'who knew it would be so hard' category. Oh and usually there are a room full of people who were willing and able to point out the problems and challenges that are inherent in the 'solution'
🧂
This indeed is a breakthrough. Fantastic. I lived on RO water for years. I had a water maker on my sailboat. It was also a breakthrough of a sort, using the “Clark pump” energy recovery principal. I could make 9 gallons an hr on just over 10 amps of 12V! So could run it on one solar panel. Now, due to intake water prefiltering, it was fairly maintenance intensive. And after easy use we would fresh water flush the membrane, costing some fresh water. This system you have here wouldn’t work on a boat due to the significant motion of the vessel. But I love it.
Let me guess, you were fresh water flushing the filter right back into the ocean.
@@y0nd3r No. as a 46 foot sailboat a thousand miles at sea, I was saving it in a giant tank to pump out when I get to shore. Where you say? Who knows. Come on, of course I was pumping it out the Same place all the “brine output goes, back in the sea. We are making only about 100 gallons of fresh for two weeks use. So brine is minuscule. Virtually unable to affect anything environmentally out in the ocean. We are not a municipality making thousands of gallons per day. And then pumping all of the brine in a giant outfall off of the beach and onto reefs etc.
you could motion stabilize it, you dont even need electric actuators for that
@@y0nd3r Moron
@@deadbeef576
Ooh, I like your thinking! Can you go into any greater detail on possible methods?
Many years ago, I spent three fire seasons on a Forest Service fire lookout with a steep, mile-long trail to a spring, the only water source. I built a solar distiller with a three chambered wooden trough, covered by a tent of clear plastic sheeting. The sun evaporated dirty water in the center trough, it condensed on the inside of the plastic sheet, and trickled into troughs on either side. I recycled dish washing water for additional dish washing, laundry and bathing and reduced four to five trips to the spring per week, to two trips per week.
As others have mentioned, what do you do with the brine after the 180 hour cycle?
They should be turning it into Salt Batteries to store the Solar Energy..
I believe this was just the test length they chose, in a real application this would be in the open water where the brine would mix with the open sea, so it could carry on operating much much longer! Thanks for the comment :D
People will literally find any reason to tear apart someone else's work... Thank you for putting in the time and effort to research, write, record, edit, and present this video--free to the people that would act as though they paid for it, no less. I'm sure I don't need to say it given your sub level, but they haven't created anything worth while, so they have no basis upon which to judge. I appreciated your exposition--even if I knew some of it or the paper is a few years old (looking through the comments) because nothing is new and telling the story of a thing is difficult, often underappreciated work.
Great news. Scaled up, this could put a dent in fears here in the American West of drought, wildfires, and urban sprawl. Thank you MIT and Shanghai Universities! Now I want to find out how soon these will be available for home use and municipal use; as well as the name of the spin-off companies in which one can invest. Thanks Ziroth.
9:01 The mechanics behind deep water circulation are the coolest thing i've learned about in a while ...
The headline of this video is all about MIT's process. But you don't get to this until about 11 minutes into the 15 minute video. Now I think Kiribati is a worthy and interesting subject but so are the thousands of other places that need desalinated water. And do we really need to rehash at length the other methods of desalination on every single video about new desalination innovations? You can't just let people look up the thousands of other videos that explain all that? Very tiresome all in all.
Thank you. Jumped to the time code
It's because the TH-cam at algorithm does not prioritize videos that are below 10 minutes long. So all creators have to pad their videos so they're over 10 minutes long. And they also have to work on getting the maximum minutes watched so they can't just make a 15 minute video with the stuff you want to see at the very beginning because you'll stop watching after the first 4 minutes. It used to not be this way. The TH-cam algorithm used to not prioritize videos that were over 10 minutes. But they put that rule in and suddenly TH-cam is a source of information became a real headache. Now of course with the success of tick tock TH-cam has been forced to be a platform for shorts as well so now you have the opposite case where you have tiny shorts that can get millions of views very quickly.
skip to 8:50 for MIT breakthrough
The slanted design also lets the device catch more sunlight, win win.
It will be interesting to see how a water panel matches up against doing the same thing with raw solar power. There may be a future where specialized panels are mixed and matched to cover a variety of roles.
This is a very good start for where there is no suitable potable water available this could change the outcome for all island nations around the world and coastlines which eventually abuse the water that they do have.
Thank you for sharing and thanks to the men and women working on this world wide solution as weather seems so tempest and unpredictable.
At 13: 45 you said it runs for 180 hours without any reduction of performance. At 14:52 you said that it would run for several years before needing maintenance. What happens at 180 hours? If you have to do something at 180 hours wouldn't that be called some kind of supervision or maintenance?
I understand that it can run with suboptimal performance after 180 hours, and it would still _function_ at whatever performance for several years. Don't know how the performance degrades over time though
After 2 minutes in gave up. Seems like old news about TMSS technology. See published paper "Ultrahigh-efficiency desalination via a thermally-localized multistage solar still", Journal: Energy & Environmental Science, Issue 3, 2020.
The MIT News article seems more like a fund raiser than anything substantive.
It's a nice start. I hope this can be refined and work in the real world scenarios since we have so much polluted water now.
great to see a very simple system. thank you.
Just looked at my water bill, I am currently paying 1.54 GBP per 1 cube meter of fresh water for domestic use, which translates to 0.154 pence per liter. Taking currency exchange rate into account, it will be just under 0.2 cent. Which I think is a funny coincidence :)
Isn't that 0.00154 per liter ? (1.54/1000 , 1m³ water = 1000 liter)
I wonder if they could make a version suitable for use in lifeboats?
No. What if it is cloudy?
Then the survivors wait until it is sunny of course. For info there are already lifeboat solar units that evaporate sea water. Plus they all should have some water supplies, to keep the survivors alive initially. My interest in this is that it is more efficient, so would make better use of the sun when it is visible. If they can make it small and rugged enough for that purpose.@@tzm1843
@@tzm1843 err, yes..? If it's cloudy either wait or resort to other methods. C'mon now.
With how important the angle of this desalinator is for maintaining the currents that keep the filters clear and the saltier water leaving the system, my concern would be that the movement of the boat would disrupt its function. I think they do make inflatable solar stills for lifeboats, though.
@@eyesofthecervino3366 Agreed, and much the same as my thinking, on all points. The team involved seem pretty innovative though. They may find a fix, if they look into it. Perhaps they could even harness wave motion to help the process?
Super video. Outstanding work.
Really interesting and clearly presented. Subscribed.
This is an awesome breakthrough. I hope it comes to market and solves this issue for many communities. However, most miracle inventions disappear into the abyss and gets gobbled up by some government to never reach the populations in which it was originally designed.
Can you provide some examples? Most 'miracle inventions' disappear because in the end they don't work. They run into problems scaling up out of a laboratory into the real world.
That's a very conspiratory view. Most "miracle" inventions turn out to not be so great after all. It usually has to do with how expensive manufacturing is, lack of scalability, side issues that only appear when taking a small thing and making it bigger etc.
Like in this video somehow the brine from the big desalination plants is a huge problem (and it usually is) but this new invention doesn't (more accurately it is omitted).
People are basically selfish and stupid. If this reaches the communities it was designed for, you can fully expect them to destroy the ocean environment near the island or shore and eventually make the ocean uninhabitable.
Did you not see in this video where he said people are already putting the solids back into the ocean with the current kind of desalinator? Everything is dead. Humans are like children running with knives. We are gonna kill ourselves.
ok, I am calling b.s. on the suppression by governments or a cabal. We are still struggling to make basic inventions better, cheaper, longer lasting ,scalable, and with lower maintenance costs.
If it's such an amazing invention. You get the book and movie deals and the talk circuit as a reward. Therefore just post the solution and schematics on the internet and as we know once it's there, it's hard to suppress said information. It's been that way since the 1990s and the internet had email, simple text, and then the web.
The big problem with desalination never been the cost. You can always scale it up to decrease the cost.
The issue always been what you do what all the salt you took off from the water.
You can't just dump it in the ocean without creating a area of high sal that will kill everything there
I know what they can do with it, those new salt batteries they been talking about. And we always need batteries.
Yes, because they never thought to try to use ocean salt for anything in the history of mankind. The brine from desalination would be so contaminated by other ions that it would require so much processing to be useful that it would be cheaper to just buy the pure chemicals. Anyone hawking these miracle water sources is trying to scam gullible investors. Do you honestly think solar stills are some kind of new technology? This is stupid - how is the thermohaline effect different from just having a pump in there to circulate the water. Circulating the water doesn't stop filters from clogging in desalination plants so how does it work here? This is snake oil.
Well, the entire desalinization economy would absolutely disagree with you but everyone is entitled to their own uninformed opinions, amiright?
@@LittleXtra So explain the phenomenon behind their little hand wave of "the salt goes away" - where does it go? The angled device they show is not novel - yea, brine falls in a water column due to density, that's the entire mechanism behind the brine pools which instantly kill all the life on the sea floor when they reach it. The brine doesn't leave the system in their example though, and once equilibrium is reached it will stop flowing. How is this device novel compared to simply pumping the brine elsewhere?
@@-Bill. it's not
realy great video mate, good job and super job from MIT
Thank you!
We are and keep fighting a battle with the shortage of fresh water we ourselves have created .
It is a constant battle and a costly one at that !
Water , especially fresh water needs to be addressed at the source !
We must turn the tide of poor waste management around the world , if not for ourselves but the other life forms that depend on it !
Ordinary current desalination at scale is already 10x cheaper than tap water in the U.K.
Doesn't matter if you are not living next to the desalination plant.
@@manup1931then don’t 🙄
Great point! I think this is at point of use, as that doesn't account for transportation costs - similarly to how micro electricity generation can be cheaper at point of use, even though it might cost more than a unit of electricity from a wind farm!
Soon a plastic filtering membrane Will be necesary to add
@@borjavivanco8600 meaningless comment, please elaborate.
what about the brine problem though? salt isn't being removed from the system so even if you add more sea water to flush it through, it still accumulates and could crystalise and clog the system..
this makes me think only thermal distillation is the best way to go environmentally so we can easily remove salt from a pot after and no sea life has to drown.
No more salt in the ocean than there was before.
They should be turning it into Salt Batteries
Very cool and if it all works as expected this could be a game changer for fresh water world wide.
I am in awe. Truly remarkable.
The tone of the video sound as if all our problems are solved, rather than taking a sober look at the work yet to be done. It’s just like how every week cancer gets cured and fusion gets solved.
Imagine lacking such basic knowledge on a subject and then ignorantly spouting your half backed opinions online for the world to laugh at. Yikes.
Oh wow just 12 minutes in and finally it's about what you showed in the thumbnail 🎉. That tangent on Kiribati was utterly pointless
Excellent and important video. Some coastal cities in south Texas are being bum rushed into buying desal plants of the old design.
May their efforts prosper beyond their wildest hopes & dreams 🙌
Yet another MIT techno scam to get clicks on a crap video.
Why do you think it's a scam?
jump to 11:50 to skip all the nonsense
I added chapters to help people skip around! I recommend watching the section from 8:50 as it is important for the MIT system
I wasn't aware I needed saving from anything. When I need water I open my tap, and the water flows. I've been living 61 years and it's always been that way. Things are fine.
Now, that was an excellent video!
This is amazing!
Oh wow, no any numbers again like all other breakthroughs of water desalinations? Sound legit!
This is really cool, thanks!
I like how the solution to salt accumulating on the lower membrane was to tip it a lil.
Needed immediately all along the coast in the USA.
We're back and this project looks like a pipe dream!
god damn that gotta be the first piece of good news I ever heard since covid.............. finally a glimmer of hope. we need more
Amazing breakthrough.
While it was mentioned several times in the video that the inhabitants collect rainwater, it wasn’t mentioned how much of their supply was furnished this way, or how much this amount has vacillated over the years . . . While I loved the vid, that would be an interesting supplemental topic in and of itself.
now, we just need a DIY tutorial on how to make hydrophobic membranes
From the video, here is what I understand.
Pros:
The machine is passive
The machine doesn’t allow salt accumulation easily
The machine does not create hyper saline water at a fast rate
The machine is solar powered
The machine is small
Cons:
The machine is solar powered (though this can be solved by having an alternative heating method)
The machine is small (can be scaled up if need be, not that big of a problem)
The membranes are in a difficult to maintain spot, requiring the entire machine to be pulled out of the housing. (Better maintenance options are to be expected)
The machine doesn’t have a solution for heavy metals (sea water may contain heavy metals, not exactly healthy nor easy to remove)
Overall, this is an ingenious device that barely costs anything to run! Further innovation should make the mechanics easier to maintain, function, and replace! I have high hopes for this tech!
Nice video, thanks :) Subscribed.
Great for small communities, also look very promising.
But looks somes way to go for large scale solutions:
- a small water treatment plant produces 10,000 Liters per hour, at a cost of about 0.0001$ per Liter (1000L per 0,10$).
- tap water consumption is commonly 200L+ per day, per person.
The displayed system also seem geographically locked: any short, sudden period of frost would destroy the intricate piping.
(I have a degree in the field, and worked for a few years with a wide range of equipment, but I'm most accustomed to river-to-tap installations)
Excellent Analysis, Deployed Worldwide Through My Deep Learning AI Research Library… Thank You.
Very interesting. Presumably something like a ePTFE microporous filter membrane is used for the hydrophobic filter.
Really nice device they had come up with.
If you read this, a word of advice: If you think you need to transform a totally fine every day measurement unit (here: liter) in something "more graspable", because your audience need it (do they? they buy lots of stuff in liter sizes when shopping), use something they know from their everyday life (e.g. standard bathtubs) instead of something like the great pyramid, which only a very small percentage have a good well memorized understanding of how large it is and how much would liquid would fit into that thing (if it would be 100% hollow, which it isn't).
Great video on desalination, just wondering if you have any information on how much land in square meters Kiribati has lost due to the rising sea levels over the last 50yrs? Surely it must be a lot as they are low lying atolls so I'm very curious to see the many papers with that data, thank you.
Thank you for this video. Good refresher for my outdated knowledge 👍 👍. Keep delivering quality content and I’ll be there. You sir gained a new subscriber today.
Do you have a patreon ?