There are many places in the world which till date don’t have clean drinking water. People living in such areas have to walk miles to get clean drinkable water. Most of these places have access to salty water which human beings cannot consume under any circumstance. Now using this salty water, designer Gabriele Diamanti has made salty water turn drinkable just with the help of a solar oven.
Eliodomestico from gabriele diamanti on Vimeo.
A student at Milan Polytechnic in 2005, Gabriele saw himself developing a strange fascination for global water scarcity. He developed a simple solar oven which has now won a Core77 Design Award for Social Impact. This solar oven works by filling the black boiler body with salty water and then closing the cap of the boiler. When the temperature rises in the daytime, the pressure grows too; which then produces steam. This steam is forced to go downwards in a connection pipe. It’s then collected in the lid which does the cat of a condenser. It turns the salty water-steam into fresh water.
Talking about his design Gabriele said, “My goal was to design something friendly and recognizable for the users. The process developed quite naturally to determine the current shape; every detail is there for a reason, so the form, as well as production techniques, represents a compromise between technical and traditional.”
After winning such a special award, Gabriele says that his solar oven has already started receiving a lot of international recognition. He simply hopes that his oven is accepted all worldwide and specially in places where it can work wonders. The design if taken up by developers and big companies, it could really bring respite to a lot of homes in the world. With locally available materials, this oven can be built and used. “The idea is that instructions for the project can be delivered to craftsmen” with the help of NGOs, he says, and then a micro-credit program could be established to finance small-scale start-ups specializing in production. “So the NGO is the spark, micro-credit is the fuse; the local craftsmen are the bomb!” Let’s see how soon and effectively it eases out the problem of water scarcity in the world.
