How can you make sea water fit for drinking?

Answer 1

Get yourself a simple distillation apparatus. It consists of a round bottom flask you put your sea water in, which then connects to a still head, and then a cold water condenser, an adapter and receiving flask. Heat the sea water to boiling, and then the pure water vapor will condense in the column, and collect in the receiving flask. The sea salts will be left behind in the original flask, and you will have nice pure water....example http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Simple_distillation_apparatus.svg

Answer 2

The first thing to consider is what is in the sea water that makes it undrinkable.

Sea water usually contains salt and random chemicals.

The easiest way to remove these impurities is to boil the water so it evaporates. The steam produced can caught on a cold angled surface, so it condenses, forms water droplets, and runs off into a container.

The safest way is to use a filter, preferably one with lots of layers for best purification.

Answer 3

Seawater is distilled by running it through equipment where heat is added to evaporate water from it. Of course the salt does not evaporate - just the water. The water vapor passes through a condensation unit where heat is removed and the water condenses to give a stream of essentially pure water. The caveat is that if there are some other volatile liquids mixed into the water they will evaporate and then condense with the water. If you were to run ocean water that had been fouled by an oil spill through a distillation unit, it would foul up the unit as the oil evaporated with the water and then condensed with it in the condensation unit. As long as that is not the case you get pure water out of the condenser. Note that it is very energy intensive to do this so it is only economical to use water distilled from seawater as a water source in places that have no other good water sources and that have a lot of energy available. It's actually used some in the Middle East where oil can be used as a much cheaper energy source and they have no significant water sources.