See, the idea would be to use a huge glass dome to catch evaporated water over the ocean. And a trough around the sides of the dome would funnel into a pipe to take the water to be further treated. The problem for me is that this idea seems so obvious that there has to be a reason why it’s not already happening.
To specify, I meant using a series of small domes just off shore. Let’s say 50 ft. diameter and you just build a lot of them like a solar panel grid.
In: Engineering
You’re effectively proposing using solar power to evaporate water so you can desalinate it.
Evaporative desalination requires an obscene amount of energy because water is so good at absorbing energy and takes a lot of energy to go from liquid to gas.
It is far far more efficient to use reverse osmosis to desalinate water, it requires about 1/10th the energy as evaporating the water. You’d be far better off building a large quantity of solar panels and a big distillation plant than building a giant dome over a portion of the ocean.
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