 Good afternoon, and welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on ThinkTech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us. We're going to have a really interesting show today. We have some truly amazing technology to showcase, and we're doing this, actually, with more technology, because our guests are joining us from Buffalo, New York, Dr. Chao-Chan Gann, and Dr. Hauman Seng, excuse me, sir. Dr. Gann is with the electrical engineering department at the University of Buffalo and is the founder of a group called Sunny Clean Water, and Dr. Seng is the Chief Technology Officer at Sunny Clean Water. Welcome to both of you. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're very good of you to take the time and on a Friday evening to come join us here. Dr. Gann and Dr. Seng have developed a really interesting, a very old technology of solar distillation. Now, maybe you can relate just sort of the very fundamental principles of what passive solar distillation is and what it does. Solar distillation, we actually use the solar energy to heat the water. Then we will evaporate the water to generate the vapor. The next step, if we condense this vapor, we can get to the seal the water, so that in this case, most of the inorganic contaminations, like carbon metals, a lot of chemicals, they can be removed, so people can produce clean water, drinkable water, using this way. But importantly, we don't need any electricity, so we only rely on solar energy. Therefore, this is environmentally benign technology. Right, and this sort of distillation process actually happens all the time. That is, our oceans are all the time, the water is evaporating, going into vapor form, condensing up in clouds, precipitating and running off on land in streams and lakes. Right, so this is sort of, it's the natural water cycle, but in a constrained format. Excellent, excellent. Now, one of the things, I mean, solar distillation has been used by a lot of people over a lot of years, and people have developed all sorts of different designs for doing solar distillation, and it's great because as you point out, its real power is that essentially water evaporates, but the salts in it, the minerals in it, the contaminants in it, typically do not evaporate with it. The bacteria stay behind, the viruses stay behind, really only the water evaporates, the water condenses, and so you end up with very fresh, very clean water at the end of this. Yeah, right. So, but traditionally the problem has been that it's not been a very efficient process, right? That is, it takes a lot of energy, a lot of energy gets wasted in the process, right? That's true. And what sort of a typical solar, old fashioned solar, still efficiency? Okay, yeah, the old technology, for example, people use a container with a black color, so there's this ball container filled with the water, so this black color will absorb the sunlight and heat the bath water, so we have to heat the entire water, so the temperature of the entire bath water will increase, so then they will evaporate, so like we cook the water, we boil the water at home, so this efficiency is really low, relatively, you know, usually it's only 30 to 40 percent. Right. And that's really the beauty of what you guys have figured out, you figured out how to take that whole excess heating of the water out of the process. Yeah. And maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of, you know, how that came about, what was your insight as to how, that you didn't need to do that really? Sure, sure. We basically, we developed, improved thermal management technology related to solar energy, so we developed a system floating on top of the bath water, and we also developed a kind of a, how power the fabric material, so also on top of the floating system, so this material, fabric material, usually you can consider the tissue, you know, tissue that can absorb the water, right? But in this case, because of the capillary force, the water from the bottom can be transported to the surface. So since the material, the fabric is black, it will absorb the solar light efficiently. In this situation, we only have to heat the surface water absorbed by this fabric paper. We don't have to heat the entire bath water, therefore our efficiency is boosted. Right, right. I think, if I'm not mistaken, we have a diagram that sort of shows that process. Yeah. Right. So, just also walk through this diagram, basically on the right-hand side, you're showing individual unit floating basically on a styrofoam block or something in the water, the water absorbs by capillary action up through the black paper, and then, you know, your solar energy is just heating up just really, that black paper, a very thin layer of water becoming very efficient in terms of evaporating water off, and then the whole unit is enclosed, as it's shown on the left, inside multiple versions that are enclosed in a plastic box that collects the water. Excellent. Okay. And yeah, I can see it. That's really, it's very sensible in a way as to, you've cut out this whole unnecessary heating part where people have been heating up a large volume of water, and we all know water has tremendous heat capacity, and so you can dump a lot of heat into water before you do much with it, before it heats up much. And instead, you basically have figured out that you really only needed to heat just that water that you wanted to evaporate off, you know? So that was quite an insight, I think. And so then you, in your initial design, when you did this, you began, you realized you were achieving quite high efficiencies, right? Can you maybe elaborate on that a little bit? Yes. Just based on this system showing in a picture, we realized around 88% energy efficiency. In other words, 88% of the solar energy used to produce vapor rather than used to heat the bulk of water. So this is, at that time, it's a record of high efficiency. Recently, we actually improved it further. Right, and now let's talk a little bit about that latest improvement. So you changed the way this absorbing tissue layer is shaped, right? Instead of having it lying flat on a surface, it actually comes up and hangs freely? Yes. And the peak for this structure is that we just want to enhance the surface area of this evaporated structure. So compared with the first design, you can see the first design is a flat structure. Now we try to enhance the evaporation surface area. Therefore, we just produce a triangular structure. But in this case, the projection area is the same, but for this new structure, the surface area is much larger. So under the same solar illumination, the surface, the light intensity, light density on this larger surface area is much lower. Therefore, the surface temperature is also lower than the first design. But in this case, most of the solar energy are used to generate a vapor rather than to heat the vapor or heat the water. So our efficiency is much higher. So actually, in principle, we can enhance our efficiency up to 100%, which means all solar energy are used to evaporate water rather than heat water. So this is a breakthrough. Yes. That is a breakthrough indeed. If you're getting very close to 100%, you're working at an amazing efficiency. I agree. Virtually unheard of in any mechanical process. You're, of course, talking about an energetic process rather than a mechanical one here. But knocking those molecules off and just using the solar energy only goes to that and not heating up a big bulk of water is, that's amazing. Yes. Yes. So this, I'm sure this did not happen overnight. What was it? Maybe you can sort of step back a bit and tell us about what kind of research you were doing and what brought you sort of to look into this. Okay. So actually, recently there is, this is a really hard to research topic. Actually, in last year, National Academy of Engineering has a global challenge forum and Dr. Song and me were invited to attend that workshop and Dr. Song had a presentation there. So actually, water scarcity is one of the global challenges. Right. So that's a motivation for my group to do the research along this direction. We started this research in 2016 because a lot of groups including MIT, Rice University and another university, Nanjing University in China, they are working on various advanced nanomaterials to enhance this solar vapor generation process. But my group, you know, we feel if the material is too expensive, it's still difficult to design, you know, for, for, for private applications. Therefore, we focused on, you know, improved the thermal management system using low cost of material. So this is our, you know, motivation. So we already worked on almost three years and we had some progress. Yes. That is, that is very interesting and you bring up a point I wanted to touch on. So this black material that you use is a, you said it's sort of a tissue like it's almost like a paper towel or something in that sense. That is, you lay, you lay, or you treat it in some way with some special material? Actually, the, the lowest cost of material is carbon. Actually, carbon is an abundant material available in this, on our planet. And therefore, we only use, we can use a low cost of carbon powder to realize a very, very good solar effect. Oh, interesting. Interesting. That's great. Again, a very, very inexpensive sort of low technology. Yes. Way to approach this. That's, that's, that's super good to think about that. And, but is there anything special about the paper or, or is it a cloth that you're using actually to this black surface rides on? Definitely. You know, this is a kind of material engineering and surface engineering research. Actually, we are also working with some collaborators to identify, you know, which material is the more evaporative. For example, actually the, the fabric industry like Nike, those kind of, for, for sports clothes industry, they are also looking for this kind of materials for the sports clothes. So, we are actually looking for, into this area, you know, to, to find the better material for evaporation. So, this is also a research topic. And we are also looking for the fabric that can last for a long time. So, it doesn't need very much maintenance, for example. Yeah. So, that can last long. And so, it's cost effective. Yeah. That's, that's a very, very interesting issue because you're going to be putting this solar steel out and different people will put it into different conditions. Hotter, cooler, more sun, less sun, cleaner water, saltier water, water that has other contaminants in it. And is that going to influence sort of your choice of, of paper or will pretty much all be the same? Definitely. Actually, because this is one of our interests at this moment because our company is, is working on auto tech. So, the environmental conditions are different areas that vary a lot. So, we have to consider their feedback to, you know, think, to think about the optimization of our product and select the different materials. Excellent. Excellent. This is, this is very exciting stuff to, to learn about. And you're, you're be commended for looking into this. And there's so many different things that, you know, on the one hand, it seems like such a simple idea, just evaporating water and having it condense. And, but there are, you know, there are many subtleties to it as you're pointing out. And that's, that's wonderful to learn about. I'm told at this point that we're going to need to go off for a brief break here for about one minute, but, and then we're going to come back and dig a little more deeply into this whole process and how it's, how it's developing and all that. Dr. Chao Chang Yan and Dr. Halman Song from Sunny Clean Water have been, are being my guess here on Lekable Science. I'm your host Ethan Allen and we'll be back in one minute. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii. Every other Monday at 11 a.m., please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Ana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Good afternoon and welcome back to Lekable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Joining me today from the University of Buffalo and our Dr. Chao Chang Yan and Dr. Halman Song, both of Sunny Clean Water, it's a new, a new company they've formed to promote in advance a great, highly efficient solar distillation process where they simply employ passively the energy from the sun, but they do so in an amazing way where they've gotten an efficiency very, very close to 100% efficient. So virtually every single photon from the sun that hits the surface of their device knocks water out of the liquid state into the vapor state and yet you're not heating up any extra water. You're not wasting any heat. You're not wasting any energy. The water is simply evaporated off and then recondenses giving you clean, fresh water. An amazing story actually. But there's always a big leap between getting a good idea and maybe demonstrating in a laboratory and then actually forming a company to go out and make this a practical application in the world. And perhaps you could talk about some of the hurdles that you faced in moving ahead. Actually we started a company last year and so as a very, very new startup company so one problem is that we need some resources. So right now we are supported by the NSF, the National Science Foundation, a work called Small Business Innovation Research that they are very supportive and help us a lot. And we are right now so we are developing the portable system which can be easy to carry and easy to use and easy for maintenance. And that's one thing we are developing and one challenge we have now. And also we have to make sure that the water we generated is okay for drink. So we are testing the quality of the water right now and try to make sure everyone can use the product very safely. Yeah. Excellent. You of course have to do that. I mean we can all say yes only the water evaporates and only the water should condense and be recaptured and no contaminants but you always of course need to check that out and do the proper tests to be sure that that's really true. But the numbers you are getting off your early tests suggest that indeed this does reduce contaminants very efficiently. You knock out essentially all the heavy metals out of water, you leave salt behind, you would leave presumably any bacteria, fungi, microbes, and also some organic compounds also can be removed. Right. And one of the nice things about your design is because it floats in a body of water you are not left with a residue. Many stills typically you have filled them first with some baseline of water and then you are left with a brine at the end or a residue that is contaminated, sort of a more densely contaminated residue. And instead by having yours just float in the water you are just essentially pulling the fresh water out of that system and leaving the rest of it undisturbed, right? Yes. Yes. That is the advantage of our solar cells that can't float on top of the water and it just absorbs the water from the water. Right. It makes it very applicable to a lot of different situations too so I immediately looked at that and thought about boaters, people doing boats, particularly long boat trips should love this because you could float one of these behind your boat and just keep tapping the fresh water from it. You could float a whole train of them as a matter of fact behind your boat, right? Yes. Yes. Actually we are looking for potential customers for this kind of boat to use like a fishing where people perform fishing on the ocean so they may need, especially if the boat is small, they may need such a kind of water purifier. Exactly. It's actually funny. I was just the other day talking to some people who are trying to reintroduce small, mainly wind driven or solar energy driven surface vessels around the Pacific Islands group who's very interested in doing this. They've already got a number of the boats out there and these are small boats. They can't carry, every square inch is critical to carry cargo and carry passengers and also something like that. It's probably a very useful thing for them to have, they'd probably be very interested in it. Yes. Our device is foldable so it can be stored in a very small area, a very small volume so it's very easy for carrying. Yes. Again, that's a real difference. A lot of the solar steels are big, they have a big case, have a rigid panel on them that they're very bulky, they're very cumbersome to work with. Again, you've very neatly done an end run around all that. The designers here we're showing here is actually an older design, there was a sort of rigid plexiglass top but now you've actually got one where it's more of a dome tent type affair and it's quite an interesting difference. Maybe at this point what would be good is to take a look at, you guys produce a video that really sort of summarizes all the stuff that we've been talking about for the last part of the show here and maybe we can bring up that video and just help our audience really get the whole picture. The shortage of fresh water is a global challenge afflicting people throughout the world. Only three percent water on this planet is a drinkable and it is not equally distributed in the world, even in areas with adequate fresh water sources. There are still concerns about water contamination including bacteria, virus and heavy metals. This is where sunny clean water can help. Our solar drink product is a system to purify natural water sources. Solar drink system can work on a sunny day to purify water from rivers, lakes or ocean. Due to the black color of the fabric, the solar energy can be converted to heat efficiently. In this process, most solar power will be used to evaporate water at the surface only. The vapor will go up and condense on the coat cover surface. Using this technology, our system can boost the performance of existing portable solar distillation systems by up to three times. Zero electricity, zero carbon emission, zero worry about water quality. Our product is suitable for outdoor activities like hiking and sailing and is important for areas affected by natural disasters. Wherever sun shines, sunny clean water works. We have solutions for personal use as well as utility level applications for small communities. Our units are low cost and can be customized. We're here to meet your unique needs in clean water generation. We use solar energy to produce fresh water. We're sunny clean water. Wow, that's really amazing to see and you capture everything very nicely in that video about the whole process and some of the real pluses of it, how it can be used in emergency situations, how it can be used by sailing vessels or boats. And again, on the small islands where I work, a little unit like that can produce what is it, two and a half, five gallons a day of fresh water that can support a person or a small family put two or three of those units. You could support a little compound of a larger family. I think it's going to make a big splash out in the Pacific Islands, I think. I feel forgive the little joke there. So where do you now stand? You started doing some field testing on this, right? You've field tested it somewhere around your own home site there. Yes. We are doing the field test right now, actually, along the research. And first, we field tested it in the University of Buffalo, the lake in our university. And then we also have our third party agency that's in Rochester that can help us test it and also test the quality of the water. And we also have customers who is in the Barbados that are also helping us to do the field testing. Also, we hope we can do more field testing in our islanders, for example, like that. So especially in Hawaii is one of our target areas. So another target is disaster relief, for example, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and probably recently Florida has some natural disaster. So we really hope we can help. Yeah, that would be great. When you get your design fine-tuned and can really produce a large number of them, you could see these could be tremendously valuable to move a whole bunch of these units into a disaster area and enable people to get water from distillation rather than having to truck water in or fly it on in, all of which are very expensive processes, ultimately. I was reading some stuff recently that in the after earthquake in Haiti, they brought an aircraft carrier which had a big reverse osmosis system to buy water. They calculated that water cost $160 a gallon, ultimately, to produce that. That's insane. I mean, people need water, and so it's worth any price, but you shouldn't be doing that, right? You should be producing it cheaply, inexpensively, with free solar power, like what you're doing there, right? Excellent, excellent. And so, you're getting started on this. I'm sure people are interested to follow up on it, and I know you've got, actually, a rather nice website there at www.sunnycleanwater.com, it's all good. Just one word, sunny clean water, just like you'd expect to spell it, and it's actually an amazing website that really shows your products very nicely and very cleanly indicates what some of the issues and the advantages and the processes are. So, that's great, I suspect there's going to be a lot of people interested in following your, do you have a sense about when you're liable to get these things into some scalable production where people could actually just reward them? Yeah, we are working on that, actually, we are preparing for, to communicate with, to bring in investments so that we can, that will enable us to scalable manufacturing. So, hopefully, we can bring this product to the marketer by the end of next year, 2019, so that a lot of people can try to use our product. Excellent, excellent. That'd be really exciting, and it's great, great to hear you can do that kind of fast turnaround. That's remarkable. If you just started this back in 2016, this local line of research, if you can within three calendar years after the start of a line of research produce a marketable product that's saving the world and doing good, that's a truly remarkable achievement. Yeah, another thing is that this might be a very good kit for education. Actually, a lot of middle school students, they contact us to request this kind of educational kit because our product covers the water scarcity, the water quality, energy, and global challenges. A lot of these kinds of global concepts can be covered by this kind of technology. So, we can produce a lot of educational kit for those make-up programs. Wow, wonderful. That's great. That's beautiful to think about, of course, it makes great sense. Educating the youth of tomorrow while providing good today, who can ask for anything more? Thank you guys very much for being on the show. Dr. Yan, Dr. Song, very nice to see you and wonderful to learn about your amazing innovation here. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. And I hope our viewers will join us next week for another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii.