Premières expérimentations

31/10/2017

Our experiment can be use to distill, it works with dirty or salt water making them both safe to drink. It's low tech as it only uses sunlight as an energy source.

 

This is how it's constructed:

Materials:

1. Bottles (they can be either plastic or glass; glass is better in terms of quality because bad plastic could release chemicals with heat. However its also harder to work with glass.)
2. Tube (any material will do, we used pvc but could also be bamboo.)
3. Glue (we recomend silicon to better seal.)
4. Cardboard or any absorbent surface
5. Cutter

Final Product:



   
    
Process:

First cut a small bottle in half, this will be the container where the water will be deposited to be destilled. its important that it can fit inside the other bottle.

Now cut the cardbox so that it fits inside the receipiant. there is two basic reasons for this:

1. To create more superficial area from which water evaporates. Without the cardbox the superficial area will be limited by the circunference of the bottle.
2. Faster evaporation. Water can regulate its temperature by moving arround (same principle we saw in class with the baloon and the lighter) this will make it harder for water to achive high energy and evaporate. The cardboard absorbes the water and separates it from the main body, making it easier and faster to evaporate.




 
Now that we have the recipient we will enclose it inside another bottle so that heat accumulates and vapor doesn't escape condensing in the inner walls to be collected. For this cut a bottle in two half, the half with the bottle cap will be at the bottom and will accumulate the water generated. The other half will be on top and by piercing with the tub it will feed the inner recipient. To ensemble just make sure that the tube hits the bottom of the inner bottle so that vapor doesnt come out (like the water trap used in toilets, as long as the bottom is submerged there will be no gas scape), or find a way to temporarily plug it. The rest of the bottle must be tightly sealed making sure there is no room for vapor to come out. Fill water through the tube and leave to the sun.

Conclusion

This devise effectiveness depends in great measure on the amount of heat it can receive, in hot weather it will certainly evaporate quickly and purify water fast. Thanks to it's lowtech it can easily be reproduced in great scales for increasing the amount of water produced.