Multi-effect distillation

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a cup of water but it's not clean, it's salty and not good for drinking. In order to make it drinkable, we can use something called "multi-effect distillation".

Firstly, let's talk about what "distillation" is - it's a process of separating things in a liquid by heating it up and then collecting the steam that comes off it.

Now for the "multi-effect" part - we're going to make the distillation process work many times in a row, and not just once.

So we start by heating up the salty water in a container. Once it gets hot, it turns into steam and rises up to the top of the container where it is collected. The steam gets collected in a separate container where it cools down and turns back into liquid. This liquid is called "distilled water".

But wait, we can do more! We can collect the distilled water and heat it up again, causing it to turn into steam again. This time, we don't need to heat it up as much because we already got rid of some of the salt. The steam rises up to the top of another container where it's collected again, and once again it cools down and turns back into liquid.

We can repeat this process many times and every time we repeat it, the amount of salt in the water gets less and less until we're left with pure drinking water!

Multi-effect distillation is a process of using the same steam multiple times to make water clean and safe to drink. And that's how we clean up salty water using multi-effect distillation!