Novel approach to desalination tech could help to ease water scarcity

University of South Australia

Wednesday, 05 February, 2025

Novel approach to desalination tech could help to ease water scarcity

A novel approach to make seawater evaporate faster than freshwater has been hailed as a significant breakthrough in desalination technology.

Seawater desalination is an effective strategy to alleviate the impending water scarcity in some parts of the world, but existing processes consume massive amounts of energy, leaving a large carbon footprint. Considering the global desalination market — which numbers around 17,000 operational plants worldwide — even small declines in desalination performance can result in the loss of tens of millions of tons of clean water.

Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA) have already demonstrated the potential of interfacial solar-powered evaporation as an energy-efficient, sustainable alternative to current desalination methods, but they are still limited by a lower evaporation rate for seawater compared to pure water due to the negative effect of salt ions on water evaporation.

UniSA materials science researcher Professor Haolan Xu has now collaborated with researchers from China on a project to develop a simple yet effective strategy to reverse this limitation.

By introducing inexpensive and common clay minerals into a floating photothermal hydrogel evaporator, the team achieved seawater evaporation rates that were 18.8% higher than pure water. This is a significant breakthrough since previous studies all found seawater evaporation rates were around 8% lower than pure water.

“The key to this breakthrough lies in the ion exchange process at the air–water interface,” Xu said. “The minerals selectively enrich magnesium and calcium ions from seawater to the evaporation surfaces, which boosts the evaporation rate of seawater. This ion exchange process occurs spontaneously during solar evaporation, making it highly convenient and cost-effective.”

The mineral materials used in the process included halloysite nanotubes (HNTs), bentonite (BN), zeolite (ZL) and montmorillonite (MN) in combination with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and sodium alginate (SA) to form a photothermal hydrogel.

“This new strategy, which could be easily integrated into existing evaporation-based desalination systems, will provide additional access to massive amounts of clean water, benefiting billions of people worldwide,” Xu said.

The researchers say the hydrogel evaporator maintained its performance even after months of immersion in seawater.

The next steps will involve exploring more strategies that can make seawater evaporation faster than pure water evaporation and apply them into practical seawater desalination.

The findings* have been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

*'Making Interfacial Solar Evaporation of Seawater Faster than Freshwater' is authored by researchers from the University of South Australia, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Jinan University, Tianjin University, University of New South Wales, University of Adelaide, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Nanjing Forestry University.

Image credit: iStock.com/aristotoo

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