The amount of naturally undrinkable water in the world outweighs drinkable water.
One of the planet's looming problems is access to drinkable water. One in six people in the world do not have reliable access to fresh water, and with a burgeoning population that statistic is only looking to increase. The problem is especially acute for population growth in areas with an existing shortage of fresh water. One solution that scientists have proposed and developed is desalination, the process of converting seawater into drinking water by removing the particles that made it undrinkable. A series of experiments were under way as of 2010 to demonstrate and improve upon the process to improve the world's access to potable water.
Nationwide Supply
In 2009, India began sponsoring experiments to develop seawater desalination to provide water for the entire country. The country has one of the largest populations in the world, and a shortage of water. Experiments with desalination for drinking water and agricultural irrigation were previously successful in Dubai and Chennai, and India wants to produce water on the scale which the population needs.
Concentration Polarization
The downsides of large scale desalination procedures are high energy requirements and large costs associated with the sizable facilities required to house the needed equipment. Researchers have described an alternative desalination process using an ion stream to polarize particles and separate clean water from liquid which was still unusable. This process successfully polarized salts, mirco-organisms, viruses and cells. These particles are pushed away from the sifting equipment, which bypasses problems with salt buildups. This method, with further refinement, was proposed as a small to medium scale solution for providing clean water in places such as disaster areas, where people need water quickly and at low cost.
Zero Discharge Desalination
One issue that troubles reverse osmosis, a common desalination process where contaminated water is evaporated (leaving the contaminating particulates behind) and re-collected as clean water, is the presence of chemicals so persistent that they limit the amount of water that can be recovered. One such trouble substance is calcium sulfate. Consequently, researchers at the University of North Carolina began successfully experimenting with technologies to remove calcium sulfate from water reclaimed by reverse osmosis. After this, the water could be run through the process again to maximize the amount of reclaimable water.
Tags: clean water, desalination process, calcium sulfate, drinkable water, drinking water
