Figure 1: Geographical distribution of the world population without safely managed drinking water (SMDW). a, Percentage share of the total population in the survey area living without SMDW as reported by WHO/UNICEF JMP. b, Population density of people without SMDW from WorldPop at 1 km resolution adjusted by JMP ratio at 1 km resolution. Built in ArcGIS 10. credit: DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03900-w
A team of researchers from X-Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory,” Google and the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program, Department of Data, Analysis, Planning and Monitoring, UNICEF, has developed a model that shows that a hypothetical device that could Uses Energy Drawing water from the air could potentially serve a billion people worldwide. In their paper published in the journal NatureThe group describes the factors that went into their model and its potential impact on the development of tools to meet the global challenge of providing safe drinking water to the world’s people.
As the researchers note, approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide experience challenges in obtaining safe drinking water. This, they note, is despite efforts to build desalination plants in the most affected countries. As efforts are made to build more plants, another approach could be adopted to meet the need in the meantime – using small portable devices that draw water from the air using solar power. The Alphabet team was working on such a device, but it was difficult to meet its goal of producing water at just one percent per liter. Recently, he made the project open-source so that others in the field can take the work forward.
In building their model, the researchers acknowledged that solar-powered devices capable of drawing water from the air only work well under certain conditions – where humidity levels routinely reach 30%, where There is a lot of sunshine and where it is warm enough. For people living in areas with such conditions, the researchers extracted average weather data from sites around the world and mapped them with populations facing water challenges. In doing so, they found that more than a billion people could benefit from a device that could produce an average of five liters of drinking water per day. They conclude by claiming that current technology trends suggest that the fictional device they envisioned in their model may soon become a reality. At that point, however, it will fall on those who are able to pay and deliver them to do so.
New solar desalination device improves efficiency by reducing heat loss
Jackson Lord et al, Global potential for wind-to-drinking water harvesting using solar energy, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03900-W
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Citation: Model shows that one billion people from the hypothetical harvesting device (2021, October 29) obtained on 30 March 2022 from https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-billion-people-safe-hypothetical-harvesting Safe drinking water is available. HTML
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