The sun and the sea - both abundant and free - are being harnessed in a unique project to create vertical sea farms floating on the ocean that can produce fresh water for drinking and agriculture.
Professor Haolan Xu and Dr Gary Owens from UniSA’s Future Industries Institute have developed the vertical floating sea farm which is made up of two chambers: an upper layer similar to a glasshouse and a lower water harvest chamber.
The researchers have shown that the recycled water produced in this way is pure enough to drink and has less salinity than the World Health Guidelines for drinking water.
In the same period, global supply of water for agricultural irrigation is expected to decline by around 19%. “Freshwater accounts for just 2.5% of the world’s water and most of this is not accessible because it’s trapped in glaciers, ice caps or is deep underground,” Dr Owens says.
“The fact that 97.5% of the world’s water is in our oceans - and freely available - it is an obvious solution to harness the sea and sun to address growing global shortages of water, food, and agricultural land. Adopting this technology could improve the health and welfare of billions of people globally.”
What’s the benefit to having it float? I get the idea of solar desalination being used to feed farms, but it would seem like a massive increase in complexity to make the farmland float. Greenhouse farming is expensive enough as it is, and i don’t see us running out of desert anytime soon.
“However, in this case, clean water is supplied by an array of solar evaporators that soak up the seawater, trap the salts in the evaporator body and, under the sun’s rays, release clean water vapour into the air which is then condensed on water belts and transferred to the upper plant growth chamber.”
To evaporate and capture the fresh water.
But that’s just a solar evaporator, you could build it in the desert where it’s not vulnerable to every storm and constant wave induced metal futege, or sinking.
Where’s the saltwater? Do you pipe it to the desert?
Looking promising, hopefully it does lead to fruition.
