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MIT Unveils Portable, Solar-Powered Water Desalination System
An anonymous reader writes "A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Field and Space Robotic Laboratory has designed a new solar-powered water desalination system to provide drinking water to disaster zones and disadvantaged parts of the planet. Desalination systems often require a lot of energy and a large infrastructure to support them, but MIT's compact system is able to cope due to its ingenious design. The system's photovoltaic panel is able to generate power for the pump, which in turn pushes undrinkable seawater through a permeable membrane. MIT's prototype can reportedly produce 80 gallons of drinking water per day, depending on weather conditions."
Pump-fed nanofilters are sort of an old idea at this point. The summary leaves off some critical points like how much it costs and how long the filter lasts.
According to the article, it costs $8000, which is a lot for some things but probably accessible for others. Let's just say it's not going to solve the world's water problem overnight, but it might be handy for relief efforts.
Surfing through to the parent MITnews article, we get a bit more information, but it's still lacking anything about how long the system can operate or what its maintenance costs and requirements are. Does it last a week then you're out most of another $8000? Does it require a lot of technical expertise to maintain? It doesn't say...
FTFA 24 of them will fit on a C130 and provide water for "more than 10,000 people", so I'm thinking more like 500 people per large unit and that's under ideal conditions. That's as opposed to a more traditional unit about the size of a cargo container that can do 200k gallons a day or enough for 40-50k people. Personally I think for large scale disasters it makes a LOT more sense to drop 2 of those and two fuel/generator sets and supply 10x more people with fresh water since every cargo flight counts.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
To get the price down, they need production of this. One simple way to do that, is to adopt it to boats in the western world. By doing this, the boats will be able to have clean water on-board available from offshore. Then as production increases, the costs go down. Then it allows these units to be produced CHEAPLY.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.