Need To Know
- University of Rochester scientists built laser-etched solar panels that desalinate seawater with no chemicals and no brine waste.
- The panels recover nearly all the salt as solid material.
- The system was tested successfully on water from three oceans, addressing a problem that affects 2.2 billion people.
A new kind of solar panel turns seawater into clean drinking water using only sunlight, leaving behind no toxic brine and even pulling out lithium for batteries.
The technology tackles two problems at once: the dirty waste that desalination usually produces, and a global shortage of safe water. The United Nations estimates that 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, and communities from California to the Middle East rely on desalination plants to convert ocean water to fresh.
Standard desalination comes at a cost. It is expensive, energy-hungry and dirty, spitting out brine that harms ocean life, and scale builds up inside systems and shuts them down.
The new approach, developed in the lab of optics and physics professor Chunlei Guo, sidesteps all of that. The system produces fresh water efficiently, operates without chemical pretreatment, and avoids creating brine waste. The team described the technology in the journal Light: Science & Applications, according to SciTechDaily…