THE COMING WATER CRISIS AND DESALINATION SOLUTIONSMore than one billion people in the world today lack clean, fresh water. In much of the world, people die of water –borne diseases, such as cholera and dysentery. Increasing populations, environmental degradation, and changes in precipitation patterns increasingly stress the availability of local water resources. In arid and semi-arid regions, in both industrialized and developing countries, the problem is the same: available fresh water supplies are near or beyond their natural limits. In many regions, serious degradation of the environment related to excessive extraction of water from surface and ground waters is already all too common. Over-pumped groundwater resources are being degraded or exhausted. Increased pollution has followed disruption of the natural hydrological balance. Water shortages are a world health, economic, and security issue. The conventional solutions for worsening water shortages involves approaches such as conservation of water resources, improving water management, and desalination of brackish groundwater and seawater where appropriate. These are all important tools, but they are not necessarily practical and or sufficient everywhere. Production of new fresh water supplies by desalination of seawater or by using water from air technology has the potential to alleviate many of these water shortages. WATER from AIRAquaVentus has developed an innovative solution for providing high-quality, clean, potable water. Aquaventus Water from Air technology efficiently condenses water from air without using chemicals or producing waste products. Collecting this water-from-air adds a new source of clean, potable water. The AquaVentus technology is highly energy-efficient and is cost-competitive with bottled water. AquaVentus water can be used as a personal water supply, as a whole-home water supply system, and for industrial and agricultural processes that require, high-quality water. AquaVentus can provide emergency supplies of water following a natural disaster shortly after being set up and when natural supplies of fresh water can be restored, the apparatus can be shut down and stored with no cleanup of the site necessary. Water from air is in effect a new water source in areas that have no natural fresh, clean water resources.DESALINATIONEach desalination technology extracts fresh water in a different way and each method has a particular range of naturally occurring physical, chemical, and thermodynamic constraints and costs. These conventional desalination technologies are now relatively mature, having been introduced many years ago and improved greatly over time. Improving the efficiencies of the existing methods of desalination has thus become a matter of fine-scale adjustment. Dramatic improvement in raising the volumes of water produced or in lowering the costs of desalination is only possible by introducing new technology, which brings with it a new range of physical and cost factors. Click here to view "Rivers From the Sea" an animated presentation of the MDS carbon dioxide desalination process.
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