Is it possible to make sea water drinkable? If affirmative, what would it take?

Question

Clumsy question, maybe, but despite being a layperson, I think that further research on this matter may bring solutions to many problems. Does anyone know if there is any info on this? Any thoughts, answers or constructive critics will be welcomed

Answer 1

Yes and maybe.

Salt can be removed from the water with a very simple distillation process. Depending on how fancy salt removal procedure is, I might drink it. That's not to say that it would taste good.

Answer 2

there's a number of processes to allow you to do it.
at the most basic level would be by the process of evaporation.
at a personal level would be to use large empty bottle painted black on the outside, make a hole in the cover large enough to stick a long tube in and seal the tube to the cover, stick the other end of the tube into another bottle like the other one except that you don't paint it black. next fill the black bottle half full of sea water, making sure that the tube is at the top , put the other unpainted bottle in the sea(that's why the tube needs to be long)
then let the sun do all the work. an hey presto!! you have a solar still. the black surface will absorb heat evapourating the water, the water vapour will condense in the other bottle as the sea water will cause it to be cooler.when most of the water has been converted then pour out what's left in the black bottle, rinse it out and refill.
at the high tech end there is reverse osmosis. where they use a special membrane to filter the salt out of the water.
i think that you can buy the special filters i don't know where you can buy them. my country(singapore) is using this method to desalinate sea water.
God bless,
gabe

Answer 3

The desalination process will make seawater drinkable. Evaporation and then condensing the water vapor will also produce drinkable water. The trick is how to do that on a large scale. There are desalination plants in operation all over the world. If you are interested, I would search on the word "desalination."

Answer 4

Yes, that can be done, but it takes lots of energy. Several oil rich desert countries are already doing it. But of course the oil they are burning to make the energy to purify the water is making global warming worse. And when their oil runs out, they will no longer be able to do it. You can in principal use solar heat to do the same thing, but you need miles and miles of collectors to make a small amount of water. It is much easier to just use the free water that rains down over most of the Earth every year. I would suppose that in all but the direst climates, a one square meter funnel can collect more rain water in a year that a one square meter solar collector could make from sea water in that same year, but I haven't done a calculation to verify that.

OK, I did a calculation. One meter of solar collector in space could make about a liter an hour. That is in space. On the ground no water could be made at night so the production is cut in half, and clouds and other problems would cut the amount in half again I guess. So a one square meter collector makes one liter of water every 4 hours, 6 liters a day and 2190 liters a year. That is water 2.19 meters deep in the 1 squaree meter collector. That is about 86 inches deep. So funnels could make the same amount of fresh water a year in an area that got 86 inches of rain in a year. Where I live we get about 30 inches a year, so I would need almost 3 square meters of funnels to replace one square meter of solar collectors. I think funnels are cheap enough compared to any kind of solar collector system to make them a better option. Just have a metal roof, put rain gutters all around your house and run the down spouts to storage tanks.

Answer 5

As of right now there is only one answer. That is solar desalination, because desalinating water takes a lot of energy to do especially if you are talking about large quantities. Some Mid-east countries do desalinate with fossil fuels but that is not (even for them) an sustainable practice.

Answer 6

boil the sea water with a still use pans to collect the fresh water