About 663 million people in this world has little access to safe
drinking water, facing effective way to disinfect the drinking water for their
consumption. To address this problem, many researches have been done to develop
such a device which can disinfect the contaminated water by using natural
energy that is available in most climate. The disinfection device is powered by the sun, and can rapidly kill
bacteria to deliver safe drinking water.
Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University in California has designed such solar energy device can disinfect water in a more efficient way. While other solar energy water purification system relies on ultraviolet light, which represents only four per cent of the total solar energy. This leads to a very slow treatment speed of up to 48 hours, limiting the amount of water people can disinfect.
To overcome this issue, the
researchers developed new materials that can harvest visible light – which
represents around 50% of solar energy - and speed up solar water purification.
