11th Conference of Italian Researchers in the World Houston Feb 26-27, 2016 Scroll down to find Bios and abstracts of speakers. 1 PARTICIPANTS (in alphabetic order) Alessandro Alabastri, Ph.D. -----
[email protected] Nordlander Nanophotonics group Physics and Astronomy Department, Rice University, Houston, TX Nanophotonics Enhanced Steam Generation and Water Desalinization Water evaporation is the fundamental process at the base of the hydrological cycle which regulates the global movement of water, affects the climate and basically keeps Earth alive. Evaporation from the ocean is necessary to purify water and to remove its salty content so that the land can be regularly supplied with fresh (and possibly drinkable) water. While being a simple and natural process, water evaporation is, in its spontaneous form, highly energy demanding and slow. The reason relies on water relatively large specific heat and vaporization latent heat which lead, at ambient conditions, to a limited evaporation rate. Considering that 1.1 billion people in the world lack access to an efficient drinking water supply and that the Oil & Gas industry produces 14 billion of barrels of wastewater annually (~70,000 liters per second), the development of efficient methods for water purification represents an urgent challenge for scientists and engineers. In this context evaporation can play a major role since water, when turned in its gaseous form, is purified from non-volatile components (such as pollutants or salt) which can be otherwise present in its liquid phase. At this purpose, it was recently found that broadly absorbing metal or carbon nanoparticles, when mixed with water, greatly enhance the evaporation rate if the solution is placed under focused sun irradiation.