The compressor – photoelectric technology to produce potable water from moisture air

Obtaining drinking water in areas where water resources (even contaminated or salty water) are completely lacking is an extremely important and complex problem. At the same time, there is always a certain amount of water vapor in the air present everywhere. The Earth's atmosphere contains a good amount of water vapor in addition to dry gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, etc. Water vapor constitutes 3% of the air mass by 4% in volume and the rest are dry gases.

However, known methods of obtaining fresh water from air vapors are extremely low-efficiency, difficult to implement and have not been widely used in practice in recent years.

At the same time, climatological studies indicate that the maximum amount of water vapor appears in the air at night, but the natural rate of their condensation is extremely low. Condensation efficiency can be significantly improved by artificial cooling techniques, which requires an external source of energy. There is a way to get the required energy from renewable sources (e.g. the sun) during the day and accumulate it for use during the night in refrigerated condensation systems.

The current study included experimental results for economical method to get a potable water, especially in areas without any the water source, such as the desert by using the air humidity condensing technique through vapor compression refrigeration -photovoltaic system. The results of the experimental study showed that the compression refrigeration – photovoltaic model produces about than 6.5 liters of freshwater per day, while consuming 0.7 kW*h/l of energy.

The results are ten times higher than the efficiency of natural (convective) water extraction processes and have lower energy costs than for obtaining fresh water by thermal distillation of 0.72 kWh/l from seawater.

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