https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-light-can-vaporize-water-without-heat-0423
"It’s the most fundamental of processes — the evaporation of water from the
surfaces of oceans and lakes, the burning off of fog in the morning sun, and
the drying of briny ponds that leaves solid salt behind. Evaporation is all
around us, and humans have been observing it and making use of it for as long
as we have existed.
And yet, it turns out, we’ve been missing a major part of the picture all
along.
In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT
has demonstrated that heat isn’t alone in causing water to evaporate. Light,
striking the water’s surface where air and water meet, can break water
molecules away and float them into the air, causing evaporation in the absence
of any source of heat.
The astonishing new discovery could have a wide range of significant
implications. It could help explain mysterious measurements over the years of
how sunlight affects clouds, and therefore affect calculations of the effects
of climate change on cloud cover and precipitation. It could also lead to new
ways of designing industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination or
drying of materials.
The findings, and the many different lines of evidence that demonstrate the
reality of the phenomenon and the details of how it works, are described today
in the journal
PNAS, in a paper by Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power
Engineering Gang Chen, postdocs Guangxin Lv and Yaodong Tu, and graduate
student James Zhang.
The authors say their study suggests that the effect should happen widely in
nature— everywhere from clouds to fogs to the surfaces of oceans, soils, and
plants — and that it could also lead to new practical applications, including
in energy and clean water production. “I think this has a lot of applications,”
Chen says. “We’re exploring all these different directions. And of course, it
also affects the basic science, like the effects of clouds on climate, because
clouds are the most uncertain aspect of climate models.”"
Via
Fix the News:
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https://fixthenews.com/good-news-on-immunisation-conservation-in-mongolia-and-clean-energy-in-china/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
