Rapid Fire
Siphon-powered Desalination
- 30 Sep 2025
- 2 min read
A new siphon-based thermal desalination system developed by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) transforms seawater into potable water.
- It is faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than traditional solar stills, addressing India’s water-stress challenges.
- Thermal desalination is a process that uses heat to evaporate pure water from saltwater, mimicking the natural water cycle by leaving salts behind and condensing the vapor into freshwater.
- Traditional solar stills, which copy nature’s water cycle to clean water, have two main problems: salt deposits that block water flow and size limits, since wicking materials can lift water only about 10–15 cm, reducing output.
Siphon-Powered Desalination System
- About: It uses the principle of siphon (gravity-driven flow through a tube or wick).
- It uses a composite siphon (fabric wick + grooved metallic surface) to draw salty water from a reservoir, while gravity ensures smooth continuous flow. The siphon flushes out salts before crystallization, preventing buildup.
- Water spreads as a thin film, evaporates, and condenses efficiently, producing over 6 liters of clean water per m² per hour under sunlight, several times higher than conventional solar stills.
- Significance: Siphon-Powered desalination unit is low-cost, scalable, and sustainable, built from simple materials like aluminum and fabric.
- It runs on solar or waste heat, works in off-grid and coastal regions, and can treat high-salinity water (up to 20%) without clogging, making it a breakthrough in brine management.
- Waste heat to power (WHP) is the process of capturing heat discarded by an existing thermal process and using that heat to generate power.
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Read more: Desalination Plants |
