In the 1990s, the Arab-American professor Omar Yaghi created a porous crystalline material known as the metal-organic framework (MOF) which has been used in many applications, including the desalination of seawater.
According to the latest issue of the Nature Sustainability journal, an Australian research team used MOF to produce a new material that can desalinate seawater within few minutes when combined with sunlight.
The currently used desalination techniques consume massive amounts of energy, however, the new method developed by researchers at the Monash University harnesses sunlight to purify water in few minutes using a process that is more efficient than existing techniques.
The Australian team created a new MOF which was partly made up of a material called MIL-53, already known for the way it reacts to water and carbon dioxide. This material can absorb salt from water in 30 minutes. After just four minutes of exposure to sunlight, the material releases all of the salt ions it's soaked up from the water, and is ready to be used again. Around 139.5 liters (nearly 37 gallons) of clean water can be produced per day from a kilogram of MOF material, based on early testing.
In a report published on Saturday by the Medical News Today website, chemical engineer Huanting Wang from Monash University said: "Thermal desalination processes by evaporation are energy-intensive, and other technologies, such as reverse osmosis, have a number of drawbacks, including high energy consumption and chemical usage in membrane cleaning and dechlorination. Sunlight is the most abundant and renewable source of energy on Earth."
"Our development of a new adsorbent-based desalination process through the use of sunlight for regeneration provides an energy-efficient and environmentally-sustainable solution for desalination," he explained.
Wang said the new affordable technique produce water that meets the WHO standards of water desalination and could help address the problem of around 785 million people who lack a clean source of drinking water globally within half an hour's walk of where they live.
