SBIR-STTR Award

For remote or isolated communities, resources and supplies such as fossil fuel must be shipped in to generate power and produce potable water, causing logistical issues and increases in greenhouse gas emissions. It would be ideal to have a combined technology integrating green energy harvest (wind, solar, and geothermal) and energy efficient desalination for potable water production. Commercial desalination technologies such as reverse osmosis and multi-stage flash distillation are difficult to be directly integrated with green energies without converting them to electricity. This program is to develop a solar powered dewvaporation desalination technology that can produce potable water at remote or isolated locations, and beat current reverse osmosis in production cost and energy requirements as well. A porous steam and heat generation panel will be developed to harvest solar energy, and integrated with a dewvaporation system to produce potable water. The program goals include operation cost of ~$1/m3, energy requirements of ~2 kWh/m3) and/or carbon emissions of ~1 kg CO2/m3, and total dissolved solids in treated water <500ppm. Phase I of the proposed program is to develop a solar powered porous steam and heat generation panel. The feasibility of the proposed approach will be demonstrated through synthesis of plasmonic nanoparticles, immobilization of plasmonic nanoparticles on fiber surfaces, construction and evaluation of a solar powered steam and heat generation module. Based on performance of the fabricated panels, a prototype dewvaporation system will be designed and simulated.