The Aim and the overview of the Procedure

We decided on the following research question: How much fresh water can we produce from the ocean water using solar energy in the process of evaporation? Moreover, we wanted to compare (if possible) the efficiency of the production of fresh water in this way with the method used in Race Rocks. Owing to unfavorable weather conditions (ironically, up until now the sky has been cloudy – it changed after we finished the experiment!) we decided to use a lamp instead of sunlight.

In order to properly conduct the experiment, we decided on the following steps:
1) getting water from the ocean
2) placing the water in a copper pipe with the salinity probe inside
3) placing the pipe with the probe in front of the lamp (thus making the water start to evaporate)
4) measuring the salinity in the intervals of 5 min. over the period of 3 hours, which would allow us to obtain 36 measurements
6) calculating the amount of fresh water produced based on the differences in salinity in the beginning and in the end of the 3-hour measurement period
and possibly 7) : comparing the efficiency of the production of fresh water using our method with the method used in Race Rocks

A detailed description of our experiment will be posted later.