Engineers at MIT and in China are aiming to turn seawater into drinking water with a completely passive device that is inspired by the ocean, and powered by the sun.

In a paper appearing today in the journal Joule, the team outlines the design for a new solar desalination system that takes in saltwater and heats it with natural sunlight.

The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00360-4

  • TurboDiesel@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Article doesn’t mention what the unit does with the salt waste.

    I support this 100%, but desalination presents a unique problem: what do we do with all the salt? Maybe the unit uses it for something, but otherwise it just miniaturizes a problem that we’re already working on.

    • Gsus4@feddit.nlOP
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      1 year ago

      If this works, it’s better than anything we have , which costs grid energy and dumps brine all the same. If anything, the smaller scale makes it easier to distribute and dilute the output brine.

      • TurboDiesel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If sea levels rise as much as they’re supposed to, this will be an invaluable tool for an enormous proportion of the country. My concern comes from capitalism getting its hooks into this.

        • Draghetta@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Capitalism bad, sure, but you can’t deny it has a way of making things scalable and affordable. If some venture co started the infrastructure to mass produce this stuff and make it possible for everybody to afford it would it be that bad?

          • Cyberwitch_7493@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            What? No, my friend you misunderstand. Mass-production makes stuff affordable and scalable. Capitalism makes it so wealth is horded and only the rich get to decide what gets made. You vote with your dollar while a billionaire votes with theirs, guess who wins.

            Mass-production is not a capitalism-exclusive unlock, it’s a dlc that can be redeemed in any economic system.

            • Jimbabwe@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Without the motivation to make a profit, few entities are both willing and able to engage in the considerable expense, risk, and effort required to spin up a mass production line.

                • Jimbabwe@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Yeah, Neanderthals were famous for their efficient large-scale manufacturing capabilities

                • Jimbabwe@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Governments are one of the few entities that are able (and occasionally willing) to spin up a mass production endeavor without the profit motive necessarily present.

                  Sometimes they essentially do this themselves via federal employees, or contractors. Sometimes they achieve the ends indirectly by incentivizing private companies with subsidies and the like.

                  Regardless of how it gets done, everyone shows up for work in the morning motivated by something. In the Soviet Union this was often the fear of imprisonment or other such violence, which was a really shitty situation for a lot of people to be in. In the modern world, it’s typically the hope that the money made will pay for food and housing and such.

                • Rinox@feddit.it
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                  1 year ago

                  The capitalist entity was the state, the political elites the ones hoarding wealth, everyone else getting the shaft.

                  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    How can the state be the capitalist entity? That makes no sense. The state controlling the means of production is literally what communism is.

            • Draghetta@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Right. We live in a capitalistic society though, not in another one. So either “capitalism gets its hooks” on this stuff or it stays inconvenient and unaffordable. Then we can speak about fantasy scenarios all we want…

    • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Evaporate it to solid, store it if need be, or distribute it back into the sea in absorbable chunks. The water’s ending up back in the sea eventually anyway, see water cycle, so it should be zero sum, just need to avoid local overloads. Seems eminently solvable.

      • DrM@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Sounds so easy for you but what to do with the excess salt is the only real problem with desalination that we have for decades now. It’s not easy to solve.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That’s only the second part of the problem too. The first part is how do we stop the salt from building up inside the device?

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          You’ve got a point, but I’m going with ‘It’d eat into our profits and no-one’s making us’.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          At the end of its cycle - after use and via sewage systems/rivers - that water will end back in the ocean, were the salt went.

          In fact not putting the salt in the ocean and instead storing it as a solid on land would over time reduce the ocean salinity as the water would end back in the ocean but not the salt.

          • Khotetsu@lib.lgbt
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            1 year ago

            You’re correct, but so are they. In the long term and at a large scale, it balances out, but in the short term, there is a very real concern about local salinity levels wherever you’re reintroducing that salt to the ocean. Keeping up with the desalination plants will be a tricky business of logistics to avoid destroying the ecosystem around where you’re dumping that salt.

            Adding the salt into water leaving sewage systems before it returns to the ocean might be a good idea, as you could basically kill two birds with one stone: put the salt back in the ocean while also avoiding damaging the local ecosystem with the fresh water of the sewage system reducing local salinity levels. But I’m no engineer or water treatment specialist, so I dunno if that’s at all a real solution.

            • havokdj@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You hit the nail in the head on that first part. People don’t realize exactly how long the water cycle takes to recover to natural levels when human intervention is accounted for. This is something that we are talking centuries to make happen, and that’s assuming we go at a steady rate rather than desalinate like we are trying to suck the oceans dry.

        • Ejh3k@lemmy.world
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          Increasing ocean salinity is a good idea. With all the ice caps melting, salinity is going further down. The salt makes the water denser, and that helps regulate temperatures. Also, the salinity differences between the poles and equator create a general current that cycles the water.

          Plus, removing the salt and eventually returning the water is bad for ocean life. Their bodies need the salt.

            • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The water too ends up back in the ocean at the end of its cycle (same as what happens with water evaporated from the ocean which ends up raining on land) after having been used.

              What that paper you linked looks into (and indeed it is important) are the local effects of constantly releasing the brine in an area, since it locally increases the salinity of the water.

              So yeah, it’s a valid problem, but not a “we can’t put the salt back in the ocean” (in fact we have do it, to otherwise over time the salinity of the ocean will decrease as the water gets returned to the ocean but in that scenario the salt would not) but rather a “we can’t just have some outlets discharging brine always in the same space” problem.

              It’s a “polution with brine water” problem rather than a “salinity of the ocean” one.

    • Dewe@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Don’t you just dump it back in the sea? Diluting should make this a minor issue right?

        • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          This is mostly a scale dependent issue. The size of this unit means it’s probably not a concern unless you ended up making thousands of them.

        • Wahots@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          Create some sort of Dead Sea salt bath / salt therapy place where people can float in the saline waters or something for cheap. Then flood a converted parking lot with the saltwater and dry it off for rusting cars deicing roads on the east coast.

        • JasSmith@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          While true, I consider the issue very minor compared to getting people clean drinking water. There are no perfect solutions in society. Just a series of trade-offs, maximising benefits and minimising costs.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Large coastal communities don’t just go down to the local jetty and cast hooks into the water by the shore. Commercial fishing is done by large ships out in the ocean, far away from the cities.

              You probably wouldn’t want to fish near a city’s sewer outflows anyway.

              • Khotetsu@lib.lgbt
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                1 year ago

                Depends on what you mean by far away and what kind of fish you’re talking about. Big fish like tuna are often caught far out at sea, but they’re also caught by the same small boats that do charter fishing an hour or two out from the shore. There’s plenty of inshore fishing that would be at risk, especially in bays where the salt would be less easily dispersed. I used to work at a fish market, and offhand I can think of multiple fishing industries that would be put at risk by carelessly dumping salt back in the ocean. The majority of shellfish, for example, is caught within sight of the beach. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but there used to be a ton of fishing done in Boston Harbor, and I’ve heard stories of crates of lobsters being opened only to find the lobsters carrying pieces of bodies dumped by the mob off the docks and into the harbor.

          • merde alors@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            i consider 🤣 ehm ehm … I consider! I CONSIDER 😁

            who the hell cares about what i consider? upvote this if you don’t give a shit about my considerations 😉

      • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Thats the big ecological question. If we do this at scale, we’ll be releasing more briny water back into the sea than we take. Over time on industrial scales, what will this do to the oceans? Is the increased salinity negligible, even at large scales? Or will it cause marine wildlife to die out?

        Think of it this way. Burning a pile of wood generates CO2. So first burning a bunch of gas or coal. A couple campfires won’t make a dent on the atmospheric composition. It’s only when we go this en masse and at industrial scales that we add appreciable CO2 to the atmosphere and cause global warming.

        The ideal way to handle desalination would be for us to use the salt that’s produced, so the concentration in the ocean remains unchanged with respect to desalination.

        • locuester@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          But the water is all being returned to the ocean rather quickly. It’s not quite the same with CO2.

          There’s some localized issues to deal with, but it’s not going to be a global salinity increase as we aren’t changing the form of the water and storing it, like the polar ice does.

          So in fact, the ocean should already be desalinating slightly from the melting ice caps.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s able to successfully reject the salt waste, which is a success. The question will be if it can reject enough of it.

      The brine itself though is a really good question. I think there’s some existing uses for it, but we’d probably need to think of new applications for it as well.

      • Dave.@aussie.zone
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        Suitcase sized device? Only one or two of them nearby? Then that’s not a problem.

        If you scale it to industrial sizes/quantities then the extra salinity in the area where you dump the waste products becomes an issue.

        Eg my coastal city uses about 135 megalitres of water a day. Supplying all that from seawater requires you to put about 5 metric tons of salt somewhere, every 24 hours.

        Stick 5 tons of salt a day directly in one place in shallow waters just offshore and you’ll end up with a dead zone a mile wide pretty quickly.

        So now you’ve got to water that salt down into something that’s only slightly saltier than usual and that can be difficult because for my example 135 million litres of water a day, you want to dilute the waste by at least 10x that (to make it approx 10 percent saltier) and now you’re cycling a billion-plus litres a day around the place.

        So this is pretty cool stuff, but just need to be careful with the side effects when it’s scaled up.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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          As I understand it such “waste salt” is usually returned to the ocean in the form of brine. The brine is denser than the ocean water around it so it flows down the slope of the land like a river into the deeps where it eventually dilutes back into the ambient water.

          Brine flows and brine pools happen naturally in some places in the ocean already. They’re common underneath sea ice - sea ice is pure water and brines flow out of it as it forms. There are brine pools in the depths of the Mediterranean because that sea has greater evaporation than it does fresh water inflow. It’s not some new horror humanity is inflicting on the ocean. If care is taken with routing the brine it shouldn’t cause much trouble to the ecosystem.

          • LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch
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            1 year ago

            It’s already a problem in some areas. It’s the scale that we do things at that causes the problem.

            CO2 also exists in large quantities by natural process, but when you increase it on a massive scale for a century, it adds up to disaster.

        • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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          1 year ago

          And guess where all that water ends up?

          It’s a closed circle so if you don’t transport the water far away it should just go back to the sea.

          Also the sea is kind of large…

          • Khotetsu@lib.lgbt
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            It’s not about the global or countrywide scale. It’s about the local scale. If you take a cup of salt and eat it, it’s going to end back up in the ocean eventually, but it’ll make you sick before it gets there. Dumping salt into an area is going to screw with the ecosystem in that area, in a major way. We actually have similar problems in many areas due to stuff like fertilizer runoff from people’s lawns during rainstorms, causing toxic algae blooms in ponds and around beaches.

    • lefaucet@slrpnk.net
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      I think the unit dumps it back into the surrounding water. I don’t think this will replace large scale reverse osmosis, but if it can produce enough for a couple people and not require external power, replacement filters, or frequent maintenance, then it’s has potential use for costal communities.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      Salt is an essential nutrient. We already make it from seawater just to get the salt! Now we’ll get some clean water as well.

    • hydro033@kbin.social
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      You put it back in the ocean. Laughable to think you would alter the ocean’s salt content this way. All of the freshwater produced would eventually end up back in the ocean anyway.

      • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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        On the large scale this is true, but the problem is that the concentrated brine doesn’t instantly dilute back into the entire ocean. In large quantities, the waste outflow would damage the local coastal ecosystem before it was sufficiently diluted.

        • Haywire@lemm.ee
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          What is “sufficiently diluted” this device discharges brine at only slightly higher levels than what it takes in.

        • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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          They’re getting really good at working with tidal flow and weather to ensure they don’t cause problems, it’s just all got to be built into the system when they design it