SEAFRONT · Passive Solar Evaporators for Green Desalination Technologies
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-11-01 → 2026-09-30
- EU contribution
- €278,571
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Passive Solar Evaporators for Green Desalination Technologies
Water scarcity affects over 1.1 billion people globally, with 2.7 billion experiencing shortages for at least one month each year. This project addresses the crisis by developing deployable, low-cost, and efficient passive solar desalination devices using optimized hydrogels, targeting off-grid and water-scarce regions like remote islands and arid climates. Hydrogels, with their hydrophilic, thermally insulating, and tunable structures, enable high solar-to-vapor conversion efficiencies with minimal energy input. However, current hydrogel-based evaporators are limited by structural instability, limited understanding of transport properties, and high costs. To overcome these challenges, we employ advanced X-ray inspection techniques (XRI) at facilities like the Advanced Photon Source to investigate capillary flow, polymer swelling, and thermal diffusion, driving the design of high-performance hydrogel materials. The project’s potential impact is significant. With over half the global population facing water access challenges, scalable hydrogel-based desalination systems can provide potable water for households, communities, and industries, while supporting agriculture and disaster relief. The modular design ensures adaptability across diverse needs. Technologically, the novel use of XRI advances the understanding of hydrogel dynamics, enabling major performance improvements. Economically, lower production costs democratize access to clean water, reducing reliance on centralized, fossil-fuel-driven infrastructure. Environmentally, passive solar desalination supports global climate neutrality goals by eliminating non-renewable energy inputs. Socially, providing clean water to underserved communities fosters gender equity and improves quality of life. By integrating advanced materials, state-of-the-art imaging, and a focus on scalability, this project offers a transformative solution to global water scarcity and advances sustainable development.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Clean freshwater is an essential ingredient for healthy human life. However, over 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to freshwater. With our already depleted natural freshwater resources and push towards climate neutrality, outlined by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, there is significant stress on the world’s water purification technologies. Capillary-driven solar evaporation provides a very promising basis for the development of cost-effective, deployable, and eco-friendly freshwater solutions to deal with this pressing global challenge. Solar evaporation is energy intensive, however, and the contamination of the capillary structures can block fluid pathways, leading to a low water yield. The concept of exploiting hydrogels as capillary-driven evaporators (CDE) in carbon-free solar desalination offers the exciting prospect of high efficiencies, cost-effective materials, and longevity. However, the transport characteristics, thermo-fluidic behaviour, and in situ structural dynamics that affect freshwater generation, are not properly understood. This project aims to develop and demonstrate high-efficiency passive solar-water desalination devices by gaining an in-situ non-invasive insight into the underlying physics of hydrogel CDEs using x-ray inspection (XRI).Prof. Evelyn N. Wang’s research lab at MIT (Device Research Laboratory, DRL) is a global leader in nanoscale transport phenomena, materials chemistry, and converting nanoscale to the device-level. The DRL will train me in these areas, and provide facilities for fabrication, XRI, and device-level solar-water simulation. During the outgoing phase, I will be incorporated into MIT’s training environment, thereby enabling my personal growth and career development, understanding of climate challenges, and awareness of diversity issues. On return to the Bernal Institute, I hope to establish myself as a leading investigator in the clean water sector, creating a new research group within Europe.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF LIMERICK · LimerickCoordinatorIreland
- MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · CambridgeUnited States
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101059502
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5fcbc771f&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union