Roses may be the inspiration for love and romance, but they are also now the inspiration behind a gadget that could provide clean drinking water for people around the world.

Researchers from the University of Texas in Austin have developed a new device for collecting and purifying water that was inspired by a rose—and it's a dramatic improvement on current methods.

At their Cockrell School of Engineering's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering the team developed a new approach that uses energy from sunlight to separate salt and other impurities from water through evaporation.

In a paper published in the most recent issue of the journal Advanced Materials, the authors outline how an origami rose provided the inspiration for developing a new kind of solar-steaming system made from layered, black paper sheets shaped into petals. Attached to a stem-like tube that collects untreated water from any water source, the 3D rose shape makes it easier for the structure to collect and retain more liquid.

Current solar-steaming technologies are usually expensive, bulky, and produce limited results. The team's method, on the other hand, uses inexpensive materials that are portable and lightweight so that each flower-like structure costs less than 2 cents and can produce more than half a gallon of water per hour per square meter.

Its resemblance to a flower is no coincidence.

Associate professor Donglei Emma Fan and her team were searching for more efficient ways to use solar-steaming for water production by using black filtered paper coated with a special type of polymer, known as polypyrrole, which is particularly good at converting solar light into thermal heat.