Award-winning UK company Desolenator has developed a product that uses solar power to turn sea-water into drinking water which it says could bring an end to the world water crisis by providing water to up to a billion people without a clean water source.
Desolenator’s product uses a patented technology to transform salt water and other dirty waters, from inland sources, into pure distilled water. Capable of producing up to 15 litres a day, the product requires no power supply, other than the sun, and has no moving parts or filters, making it incredibly easy to maintain. The unit uses no consumables and a one-off payment will provide water for households for up to 20 years, providing a vital source of water independence to those who need it most.
Already making waves in the clean-tech sector, Desolenator recently took second place at the recent Climate-KIC’s CleanLaunchpad awards in Valencia, winning them a grant towards development and a place on the Climate-KIC Accelerator programme, the first real-life business school specifically for clean-tech entrepreneurs, run by Imperial College.
The firm has now launched a crowdfunding campaign to take the groundbreaking new clean technology from a fully working prototype into production.
William Janssen, CEO, explained:
“Climate change and population growth are setting the stage for a global water crisis. A massive 97% of the world’s water is salt water and our plan to tap into this valuable and available resource to disrupt the global water crisis in an unprecedented way. The process is called desalination and today whilst 0.7% of the world’s water comes from desalination, existing technology is expensive, inefficient and disproportionally drains 0.5% of the world’s global energy supply.”
“Desolenator is different from existing desalination and home water technologies – it harnesses solar power in an elegant new way, maximising the amount of solar radiation that hits the technology’s surface area through a combination of thermal, electrical and heat exchange, creating pure clean drinking water through the power of the sun.”
Desolenator was founded in 2012 when William Janssen came up with a new idea for utilising the full potential of solar energy to turn sea-water into drinking water in water-stressed areas of the world.
Since 2013 the company has been working with Innovation Experience to make the ideas a reality, culminating in the creation of a prototype and a recent award from ClimateKIC, which sees the company become part of Imperial College’s accelerator programme for clean technology companies.
Andrew Burford, Entrepreneurship Lead, Climate-KIC UK, who recently awarded Desolenator a place on its accelerator programme commented:
“What really sparked the interest of the judges is the massive impact it can make to humanity and the fact that this can be rolled out at real scale. We saw this as a major humanitarian product but also a product that has a real commercial potential.”
Desolenator is a UK venture, with a Dutch CEO and teams in India and Abu Dhabi.
Click here for more information on the crowdfunding campaign which closes on 14 January.
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