Ultraviolet Light Sparks a New Path for Solar Desalination
Ben Sullivan
Under the unrelenting California sun, engineers at UC Riverside are exploring an invisible spectrum of light that could make solar desalination vastly more efficient. Their new experiments suggest that ultraviolet light, particularly in the deep UV range, can help separate salt from water without relying on heat.
The research team, led by Luat Vuong in the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, discovered that aluminum nitride, a hard white ceramic, can act as a kind of molecular...