Talk:Evaporation suppressing monolayers

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Okay, will begin converting references to secondary/tertiary sources in compliance with guidelines. Plazaster (talk) 04:12, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Certain Requirements for Evaporation Suppressing Monolayers in a Climate Changing World
Speaking for temperate climates like the UK, the following factors would clearly seem to be important for reservoirs: 1) A chemical (or mixture of chemicals) that is preferably non-toxic, or (disjointly) easily filtered from the water supply. 2) A chemical (or mixture of chemicals) that is reflective at high temperatures, and absorbs radiation at low temperatures (necessary as climate change will lead to greater temperature extremes - and evaporated water, as well as frozen water, are both bad - though the likelihood of a whole reservoir freezing does seem a little low for UK climates, though excessively cold water would be a bad possibility for water pipes in very cold weather, there presumably being a minimum temperature at which water must be transmitted from a reservoir in winter to prevent frozen pipes).

This particular requirement would certainly seem to be a tall order, and it is an idealistic requirement (though if anyone managed to make good on such a requirement, they would likely deserve a Nobel Prize). It seems that the most likely scenario would be such a Evaporation suppressing monolayer would have to be removable with a certain degree of ease after summer so that there were no adverse effects in winter, and that (possibly) a counterpart chemical could be added in winter and removed before summer. Clearly, given that we're dealing with reservoirs, we would want these summer-chemicals & winter-chemicals to NOT react with each other (another tall order, but not on top of the original tall order). 3) A chemical (or mixture of chemicals) that is as cheap as possible (whether such questions about costs can be answered at the R&D stage is an open question).

Clearly, each individual climate zone/reservoir will require its own individual solutions as would be expected from the climate.

It is obvious that running out of water (summer) or damaging the water transmission system (winter) are both bad.

ASavantDude (talk) 22:05, 3 July 2018 (UTC)