Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2022-10-21 Origin: Site
The earth's surface is 71% ocean and 29% land, but there are also rivers, lakes and other waters on land, and glaciers and other solid water, to say the earth's water is still a lot, statistics show that the earth's water resources up to 1.386 billion cubic kilometres, but we also know that most of the earth's water for seawater, accounting for about 96.5%, the earth's land water resources in many lakes and However, of this 2.5%, glaciers and deep groundwater in the poles, highlands and mountains account for a large part, about 2.175%, and the available freshwater resources only account for 0.325% of the Earth's water resources. On average, the amount of freshwater resources available is very small over an area that covers 29% of the Earth's surface.
In Africa, for example, the Sahara Desert in the north is very dry, while the Congo Basin in the centre is rich in precipitation.
So since there is so little fresh water available on the planet, desalination technology can be used to turn the abundant seawater into fresh water! But this is not an easy task, as desalination is so expensive to carry out on a large scale with existing desalination technology that it is currently only used to produce fresh water in places that are relatively economically advanced and where water is very scarce.
Desalination technology refers to the process of removing excess salts and minerals from water to obtain fresh water, and the main desalination technologies used today are multi-stage flash evaporation (MSF), multi-effect evaporation (MED) and reverse osmosis (RO).
On 10 August the Spanish press reported that the journal Nature Sustainability had published the results of a research team that had successfully used metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and sunlight to achieve rapid desalination - converting brackish water and seawater into safe, clean drinking water in less than 30 minutes.
The researchers used metal organic structures, a class of compounds consisting of metal ions that form a crystalline material with the largest surface area relative to any known material and are sensitive to sunlight, so this desalination method is a new adsorption desalination process using sunlight for regeneration, which in the experiment was able to not only filter out harmful particles from the water, but also achieve a daily production of 139.5 litres of pure water per day, which is more energy efficient than current desalination methods.
The study's lead sponsor, Huanting Wang, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Monash University in Australia, said, "This research provides a new avenue for the design of functional materials, demonstrating the use of solar energy to reduce energy demand and improve the sustainability of water desalination." Overall, this approach to desalination offers an effective solution both in terms of energy use and environmental sustainability, and may have a promising future.
