[Brief translation]
The development of desalination technology, which produces drinking water from seawater by removing salt, has been making progress, and the expectation of this technology has been rising as the risk of water shortage over the world due to global warming has been pointed out.
In India, experimentation of new desalination technology, which costs low, has been launched. Saga University has invented a technology of producing drinking water with electricity generated by utilizing temperature difference between surface seawater and deep seawater. With the cooperating of India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Saga University aims at constructing a facility off the coast of Chennai, southeast of India, and realizing the practical use of the technology. However, the drinking water is produced through evaporation method, costless operation can be expected as the necessary power for the desalination will be obtained by thermal energy conversion alone.
Prof. Masanori MONDE from Saga University insisted that this desalination system can be decentralized power sources and make easy for isolated islands to secure drinking water supply.
In April 2007, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that if the global warming deteriorated, we would face the decline of rainfall and the expansion of dessert area, and hundreds of million of people would suffer the water shortage.97.5% of water resource of our planet is seawater, while 2.5% is fresh water. From this point of view, seawater desalination is likely to be a key to overcoming the effects of global warming.