Orla Hill

Orla is based in the Department of Engineering and for her masters project, she will be focusing on pre-treatment processes on seawater to prepare it for use in Marine Cloud Brightening. In order to create the fine dispersal of droplets that create the brightening affect, special nozzles must be employed. Since the pores in these nozzles are so small (only 1 micron at the smallest level) the raw seawater has to be carefully filtered to remove any floating particles bigger than this. Without these pre-treatment processes, the highly specialised nozzles rapidly block up and become incapable of producing the spray. To make matters worse, sea water conditions vary hugely with location and season. Our aspiration for marine cloud brightening is that is be deployed as and when needed, targeting certain areas at greater risk, so our systems must be able to adapt to conditions all over the world. Approaching this problem by considering existing processes such as reverse osmosis, treatments in desalination plants, and wastewater reuse centres, we hope to take a step toward true climate repair, and sustainable human life on earth.