Scientists at Australia’s Monash University developed a new water purification and desalination technology that can transform seawater or any salty water into clean drinking water in under half an hour. The breakthrough has the potential to provide millions of people worldwide with safe drinking water.
The innovation uses metal-organic framework compounds (MOFs) and sunlight – with each kilogram (2.2 pounds) of MOF being able to remove harmful particles from 139.5 liters (nearly 37 gallons) of salty water. The technology is stable, cheap, reusable, uses a process that’s more efficient than existing techniques, and produces water that meets the WHO standards for desalination.
Once the material is used, it can be cleaned for reuse by exposing it to sunlight. It only takes four minutes for the material to release all of the salt ions it soaked up from the water.
Professor Huanting Wang, the lead author from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Monash University in Australia, said:
Desalination has been used to address escalating water shortages globally. Due to the availability of brackish water and seawater, and because desalination processes are reliable, treated water can be integrated within existing aquatic systems with minimal health risks. But, thermal desalination processes by evaporation are energy-intensive, and other technologies, such as reverse osmosis, has a number of drawbacks, including high energy consumption and chemical usage in membrane cleaning and dichlorination.
Sunlight is the most abundant and renewable source of energy on Earth. Our development of a new adsorbent-based desalination process through the use of sunlight for regeneration provides an energy-efficient and environmentally-sustainable solution for desalination. These sunlight-responsive MOFs can potentially be further functionalized for low-energy and environmentally-friendly means of extracting minerals for sustainable mining and other related applications.
MOFs are a class of compounds made up of metal ions that form crystalline material. MOFs are so porous that a surface area the size of a football field could fit in a teaspoon if compressed. The researchers created a new MOF (called PP-MIL-53) dedicated to the task at hand. They’re synthesized MOF was partly made of a material already known for the way it reacts to water and carbon dioxide called MIL-53. A system employing the technology could be fitted to pipes and other water systems to produce clean drinking water.
Around 785 million people worldwide lack a clean source of drinking water within a 30 minutes’ walk from where they live, according to the WHO. But saline water makes up around 97% of the water on Earth and is, therefore, a vast untapped water supply. If they can take solutions such as PSP-MIL-53 and make them accessible, suitable, and safe for human use, it could change the world.
For now, this development only highlights the sustainability and durability of using this MOF for future clean water solutions, but it’s not ready for real-world application yet.
Other way water is being purified easily include the use of a portable solar-powered water purification system, a water filtration paper made out of Bangladeshi macro-algae, a filter made with activated carbon from Styrofoam waste, a James Dyson Award-winning water filter that can be connected to any typical Jerry can, and straws that filters lead and other contamination out of dirty water instantly.
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