Akshi Kamboj (intern journalist) Lack of potable water is a major issue faced by people all over the world nowadays so much so that it takes the majority of lives every year on a global level. While on one side where we just sit and discuss the problem and do nothing to change it, someone from India took the initiative to eradicate this problem and so came up with a unique water purifying technique.
Subhash Chandra Singh, a native of Jaunpur and an alumnus of Allahabad university who is now a post-doc fellow at the University of Rochester, New York with a team of researchers has developed a technology a piece of aluminum into a water purification device using solar energy.
“In the technology when a piece of aluminum comes in contact with quick laser light, it turns it into a super-wicking, superlight-absorbing and a super-water-evaporating surface which removes all the dirt and impurities from water.”
Subhash Singh said
The project is titled ‘Solar-Trackable Super-Wicking Black Metal Panel for Photothermal water sanitation’. 24-64 liters of clean water with contaminant levels 10-100 times below the WHO standards can be produced by the one-metre square area of the device.
“We developed the technology using the same principle. In this technology, a burst of pulsed laser drills an array of micro-capillaries and turns the aluminum into a pitch-black surface. This surface pulls a thin layer of water to wet its surface through capillary effect. Thus, almost 100 % of the produced heat gets supplied to the water film on the panel surface and helps the water evaporate. The heat localisation on the panel’s surface and a change in the chemical bonding of the water molecules speed up the evaporation process by more than 20 times as compared to the natural process using the same amount of solar energy.”
explained Singh
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