Pollution, climate change and population growth are expected to affect 5 billion people by 2050 . Today, 850 million people have to worry about how they are going to provide drinking water for their families.
Problems with high levels of contamination and/or salinity of drinking water sources are continuously increasing. For many people there are currently no affordable water purification solutions available, this is also the case in the aftermath a natural disaster.
Buying water of unknown quality or producing more bottled water, than the 500 billion water bottles the world is already producing each year, cannot be a sustainable solution for their drinking water problems.
What is needed are solutions which can provide clean drinking water when the need is high, after a disaster and in the long run to increase their resilience.
SolarDew has developed a unique alternative to solve this problem with an affordable product that is easy to use, robust, extremely low in maintenance and only requires energy from the sun to produce clean water from saline, biological or chemically contaminated water. SolarDew’s unique technology eliminates the need to transport water over large distances.
Technology validated in relevant environment.
Fidelity of breadboard technology increases significantly. The basic technological components are integrated with reasonably realistic supporting elements so they can be tested in a simulated environment. Examples include “high-fidelity” laboratory integration of components.
Fidelity of breadboard technology increases significantly. The basic technological components are integrated with reasonably realistic supporting elements so they can be tested in a simulated environment. Examples include “high-fidelity” laboratory integration of components.
SolarDew has done extensive laboratory testing on the membranes and on A4 sized prototypes under an artificial sun. SolarDew is currently developing a prototype based on the final product design which incorporates the foreseen manufacturing technologies, materials and components for field testing.
How does it work?
In essence, the technology allows water to be heated by the sun and evaporated down through a proprietary membrane to produce clean water, whilst leaving bacteria, viruses, chemicals and salt behind. Through this process of solar membrane distillation one can reduce salinity by more than 10,000x in a single step. In order to increase efficiency SolarDew has created a multi-layer system whereby energy from the 1st layer is regenerated to power the 2nd layer and so on. This dramatically increases the performance per square meter. The proprietary membrane is highly resistant to fouling ensuring constant performance and low maintenance.
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