Do you know how much GOLD there is in sea water? And fish are just swimming in billions of dollars of dollars and nobody seems to care!
me when i’m trying to raise VC money and know most people don’t even understand the 3rd law of thermodynamics
They’re hyping it up like it’s some revolutionary technology but it’s literally just solar panels lol
Well, it’s half that, but it’s also claiming the company found a magic solution to stop machine degradation from boiling salt water. Some way to stop the massive amounts of corrosion and wear. A solution that’s also entirely undescribed.
Tbf, titanium is likely corrosion resistant enough for this purpose if I remember correctly. Idk how they could prevent salt leaving solution from accumulating, though.
Even if you could get past the corrosion issue, and the question of salt abrasion on the machinery, I just don’t see how this is actually any better, in a meaningful way, than just having a giant solar array and doing reverse osmosis.
It has salt byproducts, but this method does too. It’s just marketed better.
I didn’t think about the abrasiveness.
However, I think the issue with reverse osmosis is also with the wearing out of parts / maintenance. Also just complexity.
For reverse osmosis, you need to be careful about filtering large particles before hand and often times need to use some sort of oxidizer/biocide to prevent biofilms from forming on the membrane(s)
You also have to worry about the minerals in the water, pretreating it to prevent scale. And the filters themselves are complex to manufacture, and you’ll eventually need a replacement.
I’d imagine the idea behind this design is in its simplicity. You don’t have to filter the water much or pretreat it because you’re mostly running it through large pipes that can handle debris and various pH levels.
If parts break or wear out, you can probably find or even make cheap replacements since it’s mostly just going to be metal piping. You also likely don’t have to get as high pressures as you do for osmosis so you might not need an external pressure system, or if you do, not an expensive one.
You definitely don’t have to worry much about biofilms since you’ll be dealing with super high temperatures and salinity (unless some very specific extremophile bacteria/archaea get in)
So for places that are remote, this design ( if functional), might be a good choice as it will be much more easily reparable and not require speciality equipment. Nor require much specialized knowledge for that matter besides the main idea of “sunlight heats water in pipe, some evaporates, condensed water is desalinated, hot water can be used for energy”
broke: conservation of energy
woke: liberalization of energy
right? If it produced electricity, you could just dump the salt back in the water
essentially it’s one australian company claiming they can do this but now their technology is only at demonstration level. i hope it works out but i’ve seen stuff like this fail before.
also it’s not zero waste they’ll just use more electricity to turn the brine into “salt” which makes it zero discharge and let them avoid environmental regulations.
they could use that japanese tech somebody posted about last week to generate power from diluting the brine, and then find some third thing to do with it
To be fair, the video claims to crystalize the salt and not have brine in output which would make the waste stream far easier to manage.
This is fake as shit. They just handwave the actual reason this doesn’t work at all, corrosion, by saying the company says they have it working in a model. How you wonder? We don’t know! They haven’t said! The video creator doesn’t even try to speculate on a solution. But they said they’re working on a patent, so it must be very real.
One of the words in the title is in all caps so I trust it
desalinate
isn’t that the name of the WOKE lemmy developer? keep tankies out of our seawater
Lmaooo
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
