Project Details

The Challenge | Warming Planet, Cool Ideas

Your challenge is to examine existing space and Earth projects and systems and adapt them into specific technologies that help stabilize or improve the Earth’s weather, and/or eliminate processes that cause global warming. Your solution could be a technology, a movement, an idea – let your imagination have no bounds!

Cost-efficient vaporization of the ocean water

Using fresnel lenses to evaporate ocean water in a separate artificial pool to promote more cloud formation

A NASA VIEW

We know that the global warming problem is real, and it’s happening more and more, day after day. The biggest factors that influences in this event are the emissions of CO² in the atmosphere and the Oz layer. Nowadays our proccess of migration from fossil fuels is very slow, not helping revert the global warming effect fast enough to get out of the heat spyral because of the low incentive to do so.

We thought we could solve the problem making artificial clouds to help cover a bigger part of the atmosfere, causing faster evaporation of the ocean water, more reflexion of the sun rays and more precipitation, therefore helping control the temperatures of the globe.

Our solution consists of a complex where water from the ocean would be pumped in to a concrete artificial pool open to the sunlight. Just inside the water, closer to the surface there would be tungsten plates to take focused sun light from fresnel lenses that would be above the water, promoting evaporation of the water.

We chose ocean water because it is the most abundant type of water in the planet and also to help promote faster desalination of the water than normally. It should be pumped to a separate pool to prevent marine life from being damaged by the system and also to collect the remaining salt that would be the product of the system so that we wouldn't discard it back to the ocean to prevent more concentration of salt in the water.

The tungsten plates are important because of the heat they can take (3.422 °C) and because of its thermal conductivity (173 W/(m·K)) and because of their low cost.

The key to work with this system would be to control the temperature of the plates covering or not the lenses and to pump more water as the water in the tank evaporates.