Exploring the current state of play for cost-effective water treatment by membranes

This article presents a perspective on the current development and application of membranes for the treatment of water. We examine how membranes contribute to the global challenge of sustainable supply of clean water. The main theme is on desalination and how innovative science and emerging technology is being applied. Thus, we appraise how techniques such as advanced membrane materials, biomimetic membranes, hybrid systems, forward osmosis, and membrane distillation are being used to improve production to meet the increasing global demand for water

Improving the performance of trays solar still by using sand beds and reflectors

In order to maintain access to freshwater resources in water-stressed regions, it is important to improve the performance of solar-powered desalination systems with lower cost units like solar stills (SS). However, the SS produces low productivity especially through the rainy or cloudy days due to the indirect diffused beams. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to increase the yield from brackish/seawater via a solar still operating with renewable energy sources. The water depth was lowered, and thermal storage materials with different sand beds trays solar still (TSS) are used to augment the amount of yield from a SS. The effects of sandy bed height, and sand type (black and yellow) on the performance of TSS were investigated. Also, the effect of internal reflectors on the sand TSS performance was investigated. Experimental results revealed that the sandy layer (storage beds) improves the TSS production. The maximum increase in accumulated production of sandy TSS with internal reflectors was reached at sand beds height of 1 cm and black sand. In this case, the freshwater was heightened by 105 % over CSS