Affordable water for Maldives

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In Maldives we use one of the most expensive method to get potable water – reverse osmosis desalination. Below are some alternative methods which could be more affordable.

Solar Water Maker

Large-scale desalination is a smart solution if you live near the ocean and have energy to spare. But Nirmala Khandan, a civil-engineering professor at New Mexico State University, has developed a system that can be used in remote areas where there’s brackish water available but no power. The system consists of two tall vertical pipes, one of which sits atop a tank to which saltwater has been added. The tops of the pipes are connected with a third, horizontal pipe, essentially creating vacuum that enables the water to boil a lower-than-normal temperature. As it boils, fresh distilled water evaporates out and condenses in a second tank at the base of the second pipe. What little energy the system requires comes from a connected solar generator, which can give the batteries enough juice when the sun is out to last more than twenty-four hours. Worldwide Water, a Seattle company, recently licenses the technology and is developing a prototype that will cover the daily water needs of as many as fifty people at a time.

Nano Desalination

The strange thing about the water crisis is how much seemingly unusable water we have in our oceans. What we don’t have is a way for desalination plants to pump the amount of water we need without sucking every last watt of energy from the grid. But that’s about to change, starting at the molecular level. California start-up NanoH20 is developing desalination membranes engineered with nanomaterial that sift the salt out of ocean water at far lower pressure. The organic-polymer membranes, which will be available by 2010, will be compatible with existing desalination equipment, enabling plants to reduce their energy use by 20 percent or to increase their output by 70 percent when maintaining current power consumption.

Water Windmill

The ocean isn’t the only potentially endless supply of freshwater. Australian inventor Max Whisson’s latest project uses air as its source, extracting water using a specialized windmill. The blades draw air into a pressurized chamber where it’s cooled by refrigerated plates, causing the water vapor it contains to condense and run into a storage receptacle. A small version of the turbine could extract 50 to 130 gallons of water per day, with larger units producing as much as 500 gallons. Water UnLimited, Whisson’s company, expects to have a prototype that can service an individual home up and running early next year.

Smart Sanitation

Forty-five minutes. That’s the time it takes for water that was once in an Orange County, California, toilet, sewer, or God-knows-where-else to change into a form that’s purer than what’s in your morning coffee. That Groundwater Replenishment System, the first plant of its type and scale in the U.S., went online in January, converting wastewater that would otherwise get dumped into the ocean into seventy million gallons a day of freshwater. The facility uses a three-step process: microfiltration, to remove bacteria and solids; reverse osmosis, to get rid of minerals; and an ultraviolet-light and hydrogen-peroxide treatment, to destroy any remaining organic compounds. The water is then pumped into recharge basins, which disperse it into the groundwater; it eventually becomes accessible six to twelve months later. It’s enough water for half a million people, and the process consumes only about half the amount of energy of typical treatments. For another innovative water solution, see “Lord Dumpling’s Magic Water Machine,” page 98.

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