Amazing stuff! This could be huge!
We still do not even understand water very well! However, we told on a daily basis about the Global Warming hoax and the Climate Change religion!
"... After carrying out a series of new experiments and simulations, and reexamining some of the results from various groups that claimed to have exceeded the thermal limit, a team of researchers at MIT has reached a startling conclusion: Under certain conditions, at the interface where water meets air, light can directly bring about evaporation without the need for heat, and it actually does so even more efficiently than heat. In these experiments, the water was held in a hydrogel material, but the researchers suggest that the phenomenon may occur under other conditions as well. ...
The phenomenon might play a role in the formation and evolution of fog and clouds, and thus would be important to incorporate into climate models to improve their accuracy, the researchers say. And it might play an important part in many industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination of water, perhaps enabling alternatives to the step of converting sunlight to heat first. ..."
"Significance
Water evaporation under sunlight is a pervasive phenomenon, having both fundamental and practical importance in science and technology. Solar-driven evaporation rates using porous absorbers have been reported to exceed the theoretical thermal evaporation limit, but the mechanism of this phenomenon remains unclear. Here, we hypothesize that a photon can cleave off water clusters from water–vapor interfaces and call this process the photomolecular effect, in analogy to the well-known photoelectric effect. We provide experimental evidence and explain the physical driving force supporting this hypothesis. Such photomolecular evaporation process could be happening widely in nature. It may significantly impact the earth’s water cycle, climate change, and has potential clean water and energy technology applications.
Abstract
We report in this work several unexpected experimental observations on evaporation from hydrogels under visible light illumination. 1) Partially wetted hydrogels become absorbing in the visible spectral range, where the absorption by both the water and the hydrogel materials is negligible. 2) Illumination of hydrogel under solar or visible-spectrum light-emitting diode leads to evaporation rates exceeding the thermal evaporation limit, even in hydrogels without additional absorbers. 3) The evaporation rates are wavelength dependent, peaking at 520 nm. 4) Temperature of the vapor phase becomes cooler under light illumination and shows a flat region due to breaking-up of the clusters that saturates air. And 5) vapor phase transmission spectra under light show new features and peak shifts. We interpret these observations by introducing the hypothesis that photons in the visible spectrum can cleave water clusters off surfaces due to large electrical field gradients and quadrupole force on molecular clusters. We call the light-induced evaporation process the photomolecular effect. The photomolecular evaporation might be happening widely in nature, potentially impacting climate and plants’ growth, and can be exploited for clean water and energy technologies."
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