Ms. Aliza Shahzad, Green Blogger, Environmental Sciences, GCWUS.
‘New solar technology is an emerging technology, which uses sun to evaporate salty water and convert it into safe drinking water.’
According to UNICEF, about 783 people around the globe have no access to safe and clean drinking water. These people spend 200 million hours a day collectively to fetch water from great distances. And even if there are some technologies use to purify water are very expensive, require a lot of energy and time consuming, putting them beyond the reach of many communities.
Recently, many researchers are working on technologies that must be cheap, require low energy.so they introduce a new solar technology.in this technology solar stills are used which are tank like devices, and use the sun to evaporate dirty and salty water and convert it into clean and drinking water to meet the demands of people. But these expensive stills produce enough water for a small family. But now researchers have developed a new material that speeds the process of evaporation, enabling a small solar still to provide all the drinking water one family needs.
The traditional still is little more than a black-bottomed vessel filled with water and topped with clear glass or plastic. The black bottom absorbs sunlight, heating water so that it evaporates and leaves the contaminants behind. The water vapor then condenses on the clear covering and trickles into a collector. Commercially, available version produces about 0.3 liters of water per hour per square meter (L/h/m2) of the covered water’s surface area. The average person requires about 3 liters of drinking water. Providing enough drinking water for a small family requires a still around 5 square meters in size. Such devices can only produce 1.6 L/h/m2.