Researchers have developed a cost-effective technique that could deliver safe drinking water to millions of vulnerable people using cheap, sustainable materials and sunlight, reports Tech Xplore. A team led by associate professor Haolan Xu at UniSA’s Future Industries Institute has refined a technique to derive freshwater from seawater, brackish water, or contaminated water, through highly efficient solar evaporation. “In recent years, there has been a lot of attention on using solar evaporation to create fresh drinking water, but previous techniques have been too inefficient to be practically useful,” says Xu. “We have overcome those inefficiencies, and our technology can now deliver enough fresh water to support many practical needs at a fraction of the cost of existing technologies like reverse osmosis.”

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-sunlight-world-crisis.html