Designer Henry Glogau developed a no-cost lighting solution for homes in shantytowns – a skylight dubbed ‘Solar Desalination Skylight’ that provides free lighting and drinkable water.
During the day, the skylight stores the sun’s energy to light homes at night while desalinating seawater into drinking water. The skylight uses free and abundant solar energy and seawater and could be a game-changer for low-income households.
The Solar Desalination Skylight utilizes the sun’s energy to evaporate seawater. Seawater is fed through a long, skinny pipe into the chandelier-shaped skylight, where the sun’s energy extracts the salt from the water. A tap at the bottom of the skylight can then be opened to release drinkable water. At night, the remaining brine left over from the purification process generates an electrical charge to power a dim light.
The Solar Desalination Skylight is one of six finalists of the LEXUS DESIGN AWARD 2021. It’s aligned perfectly with the awards’ principles of designing and engineering a better future for society, humanity, and the planet. Other finalists include “endlessly reusable” cytologically-inspired packaging material and a terracotta-based subway cooling system that utilizes the unused wind-generated resource by trains.
Glogau’s design is practical, inexpensive, and expertly uses abundant resources to tackle two crucial issues faced by residents of shantytowns, campamentos, or favelas. In Antofagasta, Chile, the local people are already using the skylight. It’s having a significant impact on the community, as you can see in the video below, which shows a step-by-step process of how the desalination process works.
Last year, scientists at Australia’s Monash University developed a water purification and desalination technology that can transform seawater or any salty water into clean drinking water in under half an hour. The technology uses metal-organic framework compounds (MOFs) and sunlight. Once the material is used, it can be cleaned for reuse by exposing it to sunlight. It only takes four minutes for the material to release all of the salt ions it soaked up from the water.
