The Technology 

If you have ever waited for water to boil, watching the pot with the burner on “hi”, you understand how much heat and thermal energy it takes to simply boil water. This aspect of thermal desalination/distillation is what makes traditional desalination so expensive. (Reverse osmosis uses as much, or more, energy.) Obtaining the heat for the proess for ‘free’ is what is so attractive about solar-thermal methodologies. Distilled Energy was conceived as a completely solar method to continuously boil water, in order to continuously produce solar steam. The US utility patent for the device was awarded in 2015. It’s a novel, unique, disruptive method of solar thermal desalination, and has the capacity to change the way we desalinate seawater, or distill other waters. (The original concept was to desalinate seawater, but it follows that it can be used for any source of water – lake, river, pond, stream, etc.)
By utilizing the heat of the sun, you can boil water to produce solar steam. It’s that simple – kind of. The Distilled Energy device utilizes spot Fresnel lenses, (like huge magnifying glasses), that collect and concentrate solar radiation into a small spot which reaches a temperature of >1,000 degrees C. The lenses are made of a special UV-stabilized acrylic that have > 90% transmission efficiency over a large portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly in the visible and infrared. They have a life span of 20 years. The spot of intense radiation that the lenses create is used to produce solar steam. The resultant solar steam is used to provide power via a steam turbine and generator, as well as provide potable solar desalinated water.
The solar desalination/distillation circuit is a multi-stage flash(MSF) design. MSF has been employed in multiple desalination and distillation systems for a number of years. It yields high purity water, the components are readily available, and it’s less expensive than other current distillation methods. Engineering efforts have concluded that this is the best distillation method for the device, and yields the lowest cost of purified water.