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We recently learned that Light, evaporates water 4 times faster than Heat... at the same energy level.

California does not have a water problem. It has lots of water, but it is poorly managed. Your idea of using excess solar power for desalination and moving that water into reservoirs is brilliant. That’s water management! Bravo!!

Atmospheric Water Generation, basically treating air conditioner/dehumidifier condensate to potable quality, is another important fresh water solution. This can also be solar powered and in complementary usage with desalination for inland areas remote from oceans and fresh water sources.

It's hard to compete against the free and abundant energy of the sun.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. My wish is that states with coastlines would invest in fresh water.

I alsways thought it was hard to desalinate water because salt "stuck" to water too much, LOL. Great insight! So, it turned out to be entropy... it's always entropy! Thanks!

Don't forget that the other end product is an extremely salty brine that is quite poisonous if just dumped back in the ocean en masse. Worth careful planning.

Ok I never thought about using a humidifier for the purpose of creating humidity so it would need filtering again. I wonder if a dehumidifier with a filter would do the job. I bought a small tabletop dehumidifier to run while its so hot and the A.C just can't pull enough out of the air. I got 2 cups of water this morning while running overnight. I think people are over looking the power of a dehumidifier to make temperatures more comfortable. 80 degrees with 80% humidity is like being in a soup pot but with less humidity its perfectly comfortable. I hope the portable solar market becomes more affordable since it has the power to save lives!

Full video on large scale Sun heat trapping please.

One thing I loved about this experience was using the atomizer and proving that it's a fundamentally different process from evaporation. Here, you literally break down the salt water solution into tiny droplets that are carried by convection currents or another mechanism, whereas in evaporation, you take out water molecules one by one into the gas phase, so there's no way they'll carry the salt with them. You literally need a cage of water molecules to surround each sodium and chloride ion in the solution, and also, you can't take one out without the other because you'd end up with a charged particle in gaseous phase, which wouldn't make it one millimeter above the water without being attracted by the opposing negative charge they leave behind.

A couple things. First, if you're going to desalinate water, you should try to use fractional distillation to isolate useful chemicals. There's a lot of metals and minerals that could be used for making batteries. The second thing is A lot of industrial distillation uses vapor compression. You basically have a fan on the outlet that sucks the vapor out and compresses it, cooling off the vapor in the saltwater. That requires a little bit of electricity, but you could probably do that with a small fan and a pipe. That helps you to reuse some of The solar heat but also reduces the pressure in the evaporation vessel. The lower the pressure, the lower the boiling point. And even if you don't reduce the pressure by much, it's still a reduction in boiling point by a little. You could probably do that with a computer fan and some PVC pipe.

Why hasn't someone combined sand batteries and desalination? It seems like a no-brainer to capture solar heat and use it to evaporate seawater. No moving parts, No electricity needed and the salty brine left over, could be refined to be used in molten salt reactors.

there is actually another low energy method of desalination called "freeze-thaw desalination". Mostly used in chemistry lab setting to purify water from contamination. But works for salt too. It rely on the principle as ice crystal form, it actually push out impurity out of the ice structure. Assuming the freezing rate is no so fast that ice end up forming around the impurity, by freezing, remove the salty water, thawing and refreezing. It purify the water by ice's natural tendency to only form crystal structure around other ice crystal. One of the main reason why this method is less energy intensive than thermal desalination. One is heat of fusion for water is much smaller than heat of vaporization (334 J/g vs 2260 J/g), so it cost much less energy than boiling water to create equivalent unit of "pure water". Which is also another reason why arctic iceberg is biggest source of fresh water. Unlike reverse osmosis, eventually its membrane get clogged up. And the membrane need to be maintain and clean. Free-thaw-desalination don't have a membrane to maintain. Energy cost wise, theoretically freeze-thaw desalination suppose to be less than reverse osmosis. But real lab engineering result haven't be able to realize that efficiency yet. Operation wise, since freezing work more energy efficient when environmental temperature is cold, this mean at night time when energy price is at its lowest, FTD can operate at its most efficient rate. Double energy bonus right there. Now come the downside, the rate of freezing is very slow, and you cant freeze too fast either or ice crystal will end up entrap the pollutant. And lack of convection mechanism to transfer heat away mean even though ice have better thermal conductivity than water, it end up being more insulating and slowing down the production rate. So there are two factors limiting production rate and prevent large scale production. Although there are some new research that use pressure to freeze and thaw ice by shifting ice between solid and liquid in the 3 phase diagram. It's suppose to be more energy efficient and faster than just regular freezing. Since you can compress the icy water to help it maintain liquid phase to gain that convection thermal conductivity to get to lower temperature. Then slowly decompress the icy water to form ice. Then keep compress and decompress to maintain the free-thaw purification cycle. As oppose to regular heat pump cycle where heat transfer rate slow dramatically once you enter ice phase. The pressure freeze thaw cycle is faster and less energy intensive per cycle once you get to desired pressure region. Since you only cycle between two very close by pressure states. Plenty of engineering issues still need to be solved. But theoretically it's suppose to be most energy efficient method.

thank goodness for the desalination at camp lemonnier in djibouti, africa, when i was deployed. a miracle technology but damn expensive and hogged fuel like a tanker aircraft every day hundreds of gallons of fuel to produce it. i was never dehydrated and ironically tasted like from a fresh mountain spring.

Ultrasonic thingy does not evaporates water, it merely breaks it up into tiny droplets. Remember, water vapor is transparent. The fog you see above boiling water is already condensed vapor.

Desalination will always be hard because of thermodynamics, but as a viewer in our light desalination video pointed out, if we can find ways to make the process faster and diversify the energy input, we can get more fresh water along with other benefits.

For desalination, the devil in in the details. You want to make sure the intake doesn't suck up aquatic life but the most important part is making sure the waste brine goes in the right place with the proper blending and mixing energy.

You were "just" in Panama. That's what my kids laugh at me about. "Oh, he just died" I said two years ago about Oliver Sacks who had died in 2016. It's been raining heavily in Panama for a few weeks now. Granted, your "just" isn't as bad as mine but still... 🤣

In Sydney the desalinisation plants work when electricity is cheap in the evening and night time. Essentially it is used ot level to level the energy grid at the same tiem as producing water.

11:45 The excessive rain is due to Hunga Tonga Hunga Pai'i, January 2022. While it was claimed to be an eruption, it was a nuclear detonation as too much energy was released to make it a natural event. The effects have been lasting for two years, assuming no other events have taken place.

San Diego gets half of its fresh water from the Colorado basin, which is in trouble.

Desalination poses problems outside of energy use. Where do you put all the salt once you've pulled the water from it? You can't simply super saturate the area outside a desalination plant. You can certainly use it for solar salt batteries but that demand isn't constant.

If you pour cool salt water over the top of side of the collector panel before it drains into the salt water pail, the panel will condense more steam to clean water. Also this preheats the salt water before it goes into the collector so less energy is needed to turn it into steam.

There was an Interesting breakthrough in MIT using aquaphobic membranes, where only the water vapor could penetrate the membrane, which allowed more water harvest with less power use

Question, also a potential project for you to try: What if you made a black box, like a solar cooker, kinda like how you did here, but instead of using glass to condense the water, what if you put in a metal mesh that was externally cooled, angled towards your collection area? The coolness of the metal would cause the water to condense on its surface, and gravity would pull the water down along the mesh. How much energy would it take to cool the mesh to a condensable temp? How much of a temperature difference would you need? Is it more or less effective than the methods you tried here?

what about stacking processes, if the 'steam' from the ultrasonic method is less salty, it should take less energy to process that product.

If you took a metal tank and screwed a desalination filter into one end you could sink it in the ocean until the ocean pressure alone pushed fresh water through the filter. Being simplistic, if you used pumps and pipes to get that fresh water in the tank to shore the tank would keep refilling itself until the filter clogged with no energy cost and no concentrated brine. The cost of pumping the fresh water back to the surface is the cost but pumps driven by waves easily address that. Combining offshore desalination with offshore energy infrastructure, habitat restoration, food production and carbon storage can easily make these project profitable while addressing serious issues. Combining the synergies of

What about freezing the water? That also removes the salt.

Hey Ricky, you need to spend 10 or $20 on a TDS/condutcivity meter, so you can measure salt ppm in supply and distillate sides.

A good video, you kept the explanation short, and went right to the various systems. You mentioned energy requirements to evaporate the water, or to pump it through the filters. Solar PV should eliminate most of the cost, since once it's in place it starts giving back. even solar thermal is mostly free since we use the sun's energy. Just read an article today about a start up, they are using small diameter tubes, heating the top with waste heat, and keeping the bottom part cool, they can generate 600 gallons a day. They will be building a test plant in Tonga.

I understand fresh water is one of those underpriced and under-appreciated commodities - especially in California. Imagine you have a barge on the ocean. It’s covered in solar panels. Onboard is a heat pump which warms seawater brine and cools the evaporated water. A vacuum pump depressurizes the tanks, to lower the boiling temperature. You’d need to pump out the brine and the condensate, though you wouldn’t need to pump in the fresh seawater. This is the most efficient setup I can imagine for a land-based desalination facility, though it may be possible to increase efficiency. On a barge at sea, if one uses solar energy to raise the temperature of the brine, for example. She might also use cool water from deeper in the ocean to condense the evaporated water. Nearly energy-free; only a vacuum pump and two fluid pumps to run. I’d be interested in donating my time to build a prototype. Maybe a local college would be interested in funding. There’s no patent opportunity here, so no one’s gonna get rich. But creating and manufacturing the equipment which solves the water problems in California could prove to be lucrative. Worth a phone call at least? Joe

Regarding the photo molecular effect does this work with radioactive radiation too? I was thinking about desalination by heat from transformers or cooling stations from power plants or even large Radioactive thermal generators.

interesting pursuit of ideas thanks

This tech will be more and more needed in the future,

My town reuse our drinking water 15 times before we drink it, beat that if you can! 🇸🇪

one idea i had about solar desalination. what if we piped salt water from the oceans to man made salt-water lakes. if we prevent the water from seeping into the ground , eventually the water cycle would naturally create more fresh water elsewhere (via evaporation and rain). it's not a direct method, but it might help in large desert areas with a lot of open space

The trick is keeping water in the soil. We have a giant sponge we have neglected by not nurturing our trees and plants. we need to start a planetary wide gardening program to repair all the damage. We’ve done by paving roads everywhere and deforesting.

the best way to do it is put the desalination plant next to an oil refinery or power plant. you need to build a cascading multiflow counterflow spray evaporation towers. this is the same technique that produces instant coffee and powdered milk. you aim to produce crystalized salt with distilled water as a byproduct. you use sea water filtered through a series of gravel and fine sand and possibly a centrifugal separator to eliminate particulate. then the cold water is pumped into the water jacket of the downstream spray tower. this acts as an economizer and preheater. the cold seawater then exits at counterflow to achieve a higher temperature scavenged from the downstream spray tower, it enters the next upstream spray tower. and depending how many stages, you keep doing this and then feed it to the waste heat heat-exchanger. you can then heat it counterflow to any other waste fuel heat generator to increase exit temperature. this heated seawater is then pumped at high pressure to the first stage spray tower thus flash evaporating steam and separating the brine and salt to the bottom. the brine and salt are sent to a dryer separator and the brine is reinjected and heated by the first stage exit steam into the 2nd stage spray tower. then do this in a cascading manner. this will be an efficient way of potable producing water and salt.

Its just a matter of investment. Modern flash desal.plants can produce up to 3.8 giga litres per day. Comparable to a medium sized river. The capital imvestment needed (nuhclear power plant plus desal.plant) for this river is about $20bn.

Very cool and very much needed for salty coastal cities around the world. For arid interior places? We need to focus on water recycling technology that recycles sewage water into potable water again... Like I believe Phoenix uses to add hydration to their region... Calgary could probably use that as well after their main water line collapsed limiting capacity to 25% of the cities regular needs for 1.6 million people... And the Calgary Stampede which takes place in about 2 weeks...

We need a photomolecular effect demonstration!

For solar desalination, try separating your heating and condensing chambers.

The ultrasonic system does not cause evaporation, it causes aerosolization, i.e., it makes little droplets of the fluid including anything dissolved in it. This is why I don't use ultrasonic humidifiers. My tap water is hard water and it deposits hard water scale on everything in the room including the interior of my lungs. Maybe not a health threat (I don't know) but definitely something I want to avoid.

You could also use excess solar to may Hydrogen and then you could desalinate water anytime you wanted!

this is still quite a naive overview because its not taking into account degradation . salt water is incredibly corrosive and therefore requires stainless steel or resistant coatings which even then needs to be replaced every 5 years , the reverse osmosis membranes degrade in 3 years . We can extend this type of consideration then to the powersupply battery aswell , with 2k cycles , its going to degrade in 3 years , and even the solar panel efficiency degrades by 1% per year ( from 24% efficiency when new ) . the difficulty is not simply the setup that works for short term demonstration , the difficulty is in finding the most efficient setup for the long term .

I could be mistaken, but I thought thermal desalination along the coast used cold deep-ocean water to cool down the steam ? Maybe some off-shore wind and wave power for electricity, and like you said run the desalination only when there's sufficient wind power. Or maybe use reverse osmosis instead of thermal process ? Side question - how much power from power company is needed to run a Tesla type super-charger - a half or whole megawatt ? Would a residential home even be allowed to use that much power ?

Great video. I'm curious about advancements in membranes including ones such as Perforene which is made out of graphene. Increasing the efficiency of reverse osmosis membranes to use less energy and decreasing the cost of said membranes presents a valueable opportunity to desalinate water affordably.

You could have used the cool section of the heat pump as a condenser. Not quite ultrasonic but you may be into something with reducing pressure to reduce boiling point or localised pressure reduction perhaps coupled with the heat-pump itself which also uses pressure & state-change. Could a chemical (another salt) be added to the saline to compete with the existing salt & ease the release? I think there's more to be looked into here.

Can you rerun the solar distill experiment for a day and weigh the amount of water you got? And what was the area of the solar collection? I'd like to see some real numbers.

How much can you save on the heating process when lowering pressure? How low could you go, could you get the water to boil without heat source?

Would have liked to know the specs of the EcoFlow and the Battery Chemistry in it (LFP/ NMC Batteries?).

I think using the excess energy produced by renewables would be put to good use generating heat. Grid scale batteries, yeeesh. We already have had 2 fires here in Aust letting out a cocktail of poisonous fumes in grid scale battery installs.

The energy requirement for reverse osmosis isn't the only issue, RO requires only a few kWh per cubic meter of water, while not nothing, it is in itself not that much of a problem, except when absurd quantities of water is needed, like when irrigating deserts to grow plants that requires a lot of water. Other issues is the filters needed, and that the water doesn't become absolutely clean. The higher salinity the source water is, and the lower salinity required, the bigger filters and more energy is needed. Again, a salinity low enough for drinking water is one thing, but water for irrigation in areas that doesn't any significant rainfall requires very low salinity to prevent too fast salinization of the soil. There's an other option, that I think is more interesting, and that's vacuum distillation. For water in a "vacuum" the actual temperature becomes the boiling point, which means very small temperature differences, within normal ambient temperatures, can be utilized to distill water, like just the temperature difference between something in the sun and in the shade, or night and day, absolute temperature and wet bulb temperature and so on. Vacuum distillation is widely used, but mostly to enhance efficiency/output of distillation driven by high energy inputs in case of thermal desalination systems. But, it wouldn't be difficult to design a system that don't require high grade energy for the distillation process. A lack of water usually means large difference in temperature between day and night, which is great for "free energy" vacuum distillation.

dubai had a desalination plant producing 1000 litres for 2.9kwh, powered by solar in the day (natural gas + nuclear at night)

Why energy-intensive desalination? Use a simple (but space-intensive) system to liquefy (condense) the water vapor above the sea (there is plenty of it there) by cooling it. And you have fresh water! Condensation through cooling uses significantly less energy (~1/10) than the currently cheapest desalination. The energy can be generated inexpensively and in an environmentally friendly way by nearby wind farms. This type of fresh water extraction has not been used to date because energy was cheap and apparently available in unlimited quantities.

If we can use nuclear energy options to provide energy to the desalination process then we wouldn't have an energy demand issue

I was wondering if mold is any issue over time with that system?

Solar Still was made as old as time, but we know it's slow to quench a village.

Ricky, those microporous filters need a back flow of water to remove the salts, last time I had anything to do with them; how do these flush the salt and recharge? It wasn't just the energy it takes, it was a portion of the clean water ultimately produced in the past.

The NEOM solar domes for desalinization seem promising

Just ask Elon how to do it. He is going to build a Mars colony.

Making sugar in a vacuum. Exponential tendency of water boiling reduction from atmospheric pressure drop.

What about the green Laser from your last video? Wouldn't that require less energy?

Need a home unit! Thanks

Almost no information in this video that grade school students didn't already learn.

Waters boiling point is greatly reduced at low pressures, even down to room temperature. A vacuum pump on a water container discharging through a cooling coil would need little to no heat to work. You should even be able to use the waste heat from the pump. I'm a little surprised the ultrasonic didn't work... it should be able to be made to work. I wonder what the actual salt concentration was.

In your animation, the Na and Cl atoms separate when dissolved in water. Does that mean it is not really salt at that point?

California should set up a pipe to pump the excess water back to the Colorado River under a hydro net metering agreement.

How About lowering the air pressure in the chamber? That should reduce the energy necesary to maje the Water boild. Of course you would nedd a dual chamber to make a vacuum and then open the Water, as the vacuum is fill with vapor the sakt stays in the inner chamber... Maybe it will work

Your other video about a recent discovery regarding water evaporation would be a good additive to this scenario! >............:)

@13:37 Entropy is not the measure of how disordered a system is. It is the measure of how homogeneous a system is. Having the salt ions distributed thru-out the water is more homogeneous than having the salt in crystals separated from the water.

If you need heat I can think of at least a dozen or more industries, that have excessive heat, to use for desalination.

With sodium batteries coming, this could become something getting significant R&D.

Hey Ricky, why don’t you do an episode on rainwater collection? Global warming increases rainfall which can be collected for immediate use and/or redirected to replenish the water table.

A "few" years ago I watched this documentary about stone pots built in such a way that people could leave it in the desert heat all day and they would have a few liters of fresh water in the evening. Ever since I've been wondering: can't they dig a canal from the sea straight into the desert and somehow do the same on a larger scale? Disclaimer: I have a master in sociology so nothing that comes even remotely close STEM, so forgive me if I say the most stupid things.

Would like to know more

Weird ideas. What if we electrolysis the water to O and H and then burn it back to water. Use that burn to generate some of that power back. What would be this setups efficiency and draw backs?

Does anyone use vacuum to reduce the boiling point?

What if you reversed the system. Membrane at the bottom and pouring the salt water on top. I wonder how deep the tank would have to be to create enough pressure from gravity.

I’m confused why you can’t use glass and mirrors like they did in ancient times for ‘death rays’ to desolate water with the power of the sun.

The aliens know how to desalinate for free.

how about some ultraviolet laser separation 🤔

Oneka technologies makes fresh water using waves to power the process! Please Ricky ,Check out all the innovation going on in desalination , not just heat?

Its only hard for people who can't for example adequately seal a box.

what about using desalination to increase salt mining production?

Graphene filters + perovskite solar PV cells = infinite water for almost £0.

Great episode, I wonder how we can better monetize the resulting brine, help cover the costs of added solar/wind/wave generation/renewable power. This application make more sense by the cost , within 1 mile, wind and wave Generation power can also be harvested. a more in depth video sounds great.

How can I send you some picture of our development?

Was it the article I read from MIT journals few months ago…?🤔

What's the average cali water tax (gpt did not have a good answer)? How does that compare to fuel tax? Water is body fuel - perhaps it should be taxed accordingly to build those plants?

"salt left behind and requires clean up" don't you mean free salt!

Excellent point about shifting demand, but in addition we should ban non-agricultural irrigation. That means watering yards. Plant plants that can survive natural rainfall levels, or plant agricultural products. That last one could have some fringe benefits. Or move to a region that has water rather than doing this bizzare thing where everyone tries to live where there are resource limitations and pikachu faces when they notice a shortage.

8:41 Is there any water down there? Maybe I need new glasses, bc it looks empty to me.

Direct solar desalination should be more efficient than electric powered thermal desalination as the solar photons help energize and separate the ions. Simpler direct solar setups are also more accessible in much of the developing world (Southeast Asia, Polynesia, Melanesia, Africa, indigenous tribes and religious groups living traditional lifestyles throughout the world, etc.) that doesn't' yet have easy access to reliable electricity.

If light evaporates water, why not just blast it with super bright light and collect the runoff?

Read Brad Lancasters Harvesting Rainwater books. We need to save the rain for a sunny day.

Regarding your sponsor, EcoFlow... I notice you don't ever mention the actual energy storage in kWh, or time that you can run the stated loads. It seems deceptive to only state the maximum instantaneous power output without total energy storage. Example: a 4000w load running for 1hr equates to 4kWh of storage. When I am explaining off grid power systems to potential clients, I give them ALL the data, suggest you and EvoFlow do the same.

There is more to it than that also. The water has to be filtered before entering the desalination plant. There is a brine solution left over that is waste water that you have to get rid of after desalination. you can't just dump it directly into the water way because that effects the chemistry of the natural area. You have warm water afterwards which is great for bacteria and other stuff to grow in so you have to make sure it's clean. And you have to add minerals and other things back into the water. Elon Musk was saying that it's cheap and easy. He doesn't know anything.

6:00 You can't do this with a heat pump, the temp is too high, if they could deliver 3-5X efficiency >100c we would make generators powered by the heat in the local environment.