Exploring Thermal and Solar Distillation

Overview

Most of the water on Earth is salty and not safe for people to drink, so it is important to understand how desalination works. Desalination is the process of removing salt from seawater to make it safe for drinking. Two simple methods of distillation that are easy to practice in daily life are thermal desalination, which harnesses heat to evaporate water, and solar desalination, which uses solar energy. It is extremely useful to know which method makes the safest drinking water. Our hypothesis is that the lid thermal distiller will result in cleaner water. To test these desalination methods, we built two thermal distillers (a lid distiller and a funnel distiller) as well as two solar distillers (a plastic bottle distiller and a tennis ball distiller). We filled each with seawater and allowed the water to evaporate. We stopped the experiment when all the water had evaporated or when four hours had passed. Afterward, we tested the collected water by measuring its pH level and parts per million (ppm). We repeated each measurement eight times using the same water sample and calculated the average of the results. The solar distillers took extremely long and among the thermal distillers, the funnel worked best with an average of 403.875 ppm and 6.95 pH. Our hypothesis, which predicted that the lid distiller would yield the cleanest water, was disproved by our experiment. Instead, the best performing distiller was the thermal funnel distiller. This shows that, in our experiment, thermal distillation worked better on average than solar distillation.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Chemistry (Junior Division) · Entry J-05-08

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