Wednesday 6 February 2008

Fresh Water For The World's Poorest

ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Lack of water causes great distress among the population in large parts of Africa and Asia. Small decentralized water treatment plants with an autonomous power supply can help solve the problem: They transform salty seawater or brackish water into pure drinking water.

Large industrial plants for the desalination of seawater deliver 50 million cubic meters of fresh water every day – particularly in the coastal cities of the Middle East. However, the technology is complex and consumes large amounts of energy. It is not suitable for the arid and semiarid regions of Africa and India, though these are the very places where it is becoming increasingly difficult to supply drinking water, particularly in rural areas.

“The regions have a very poor infrastructure. Quite often there is no electricity grid, so conventional desalination plants are out of the question,” states Joachim Koschikowski of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg. In various EU-funded projects over the past few years, he and his team have developed small, decentralized water desalination plants that produce fresh drinking water with their own independent solar power supply

Source - scienedaily

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