A Windmill That Could Turning Salt Water Into Clean,Drinking Water

It’s always great when we get to feature new inventions that could change the world for the better. Take this windmill for example. It’s capable of turning salt water into pure, clean drinking water.

The windmill works on the simple process of reverse osmosis, something you must have heard of in your high school ‘ionic chemistry’. There is no electricity required for the reverse osmosis system, so it could be an ideal solution for many third world countries. It’s capable of producing enough water for 500 people in a single day. Water reservoirs will allow enough water to be stored for five days, so even in mild drought situations, or if there is not enough wind for a few days, there will be enough reserve water.
The windmill was designed at the Delft University of Technology, Delft in The Netherlands. It runs by using the wind’s mechanical force to pump water, and utilizes a high tech reverse osmosis membrane. The pumped water is pushed against this membrane at approximately 60 bar of pressure, and the salt is kept inside while pure water travels across the membrane. This would mean that you can derive fresh water out of the seas. The windmill setup is estimated to 5 to 10 m3 of fresh water a day, based on the device’s capacity at varying wind speeds. This could be the technology that changes the world and quenches the thirst of many souls across the planet.
If these wind-driven machines were installed in nations in which people are being forced to drink contaminated drinking water, millions of diseases and deaths could be prevented.

The windmill setup is currently near the A13 motorway outside Delft. It will be transported to Curaçao for field testing using salt water later this week. TU Delft hopes to offer similar devices to small villages in dry, isolated coastal areas. The fact that the purely mechanical process is superior in terms of efficiency and simplicity to the electro-mechanical system is a reminder that in this modern world of high tech electronics, sometimes the most "high tech" solution is one with no electronics at all.

The technology is still in developmental stage and it is now almost ready for field testing. We have seen many such claims fall apart in the past, but one hopes and prays that this one will come through. While the prospect is really exciting, it still makes me wonder what man would do if he had this sorts of technology.