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A team of researchers from The Australian National University have discovered a way to remove salt from seawater using nanotubes made from boron and nitrogen atoms that will make the process up to five times faster.
With 25 percent of the world’s population currently affected by water shortages, researchers Dr Tamsyn Hilder, Dr Dan Gordon and group leader Professor Shin-Ho Chung from the Computational Biophysics Group at the Research School of Biology at ANU have come up with a way to eliminate all salt from seawater whilst maintaining high water flow rates. Their results have been published in the journal Small.
With population growth and climate change limiting the world’s fresh water stores, desalination and demineralization are fast becoming feasible solutions. However, there is an urgent need to make the process of desalination more effective and less costly than current methods. Nanotechnology-based water purification devices, such as those proposed by Hilder, Gordon and Chung, have the potential to transform the field of desalination.
“Boron nitride nanotubes can be thought of as a hollow cylindrical tube made up of boron and nitrogen atoms,” said Dr Hilder. “These nanotubes are incredibly small, with diameters less than one-billionth of a meter, or 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of a single strand of human hair.
“Current desalination methods force seawater through a filter using energies four times larger than necessary. Throughout the desalination process salt must be removed from one side of the filter to avoid the need to apply even larger energies.
“Using boron nitride nanotubes, and the same operating pressure as current desalination methods, we can achieve 100 percent salt rejection for concentrations twice that of seawater with water flowing four times faster, which means a much faster and more efficient desalination process.”
Hilder, Gordon and Chung use computational tools to simulate the water and salt moving through the nanotube. They found that the boron nitride nanotubes not only eliminate salt but also allow water to flow through extraordinarily fast, comparable to biological water channels naturally found in the body.www.azonano.com...
Originally posted by Nick_X
Research on purifying sewage would be much better spent ie, cleaning up our own mess, instead of finding new sources of fresh water we can create more mess with.
Originally posted by schrodingers dog
reply to post by mopusvindictus
Yet I always worry that when we find solutions such as these instead of changing our consumption habits what ends happening in the long run is that we create different and greater problems down the line.
(emphasis mine, from the OP article)
However, there is an urgent need to make the process of desalination more effective and less costly than current methods. Nanotechnology-based water purification devices, such as those proposed by Hilder, Gordon and Chung, have the potential to transform the field of desalination.
Groundwater (which may contain dissolved salts or other contaminants) or surface water (which may have high turbidity or contain microorganisms) is pumped into a tank with an ultrafiltration membrane, which removes viruses and bacteria. This water is fit for cleaning and bathing. Ten percent of that water undergoes nanofiltration and reverse osmosis in the second stage of purification, which removes salts and trace contaminants, producing drinking water. A photovoltaic solar array tracks the sun and powers the pumps needed to process the water, using the plentiful sunlight available in remote regions of Australia not served by the power grid.
Originally posted by schrodingers dog
reply to post by buddhasystem
I think you will find that drought affects an awful lot of people in developed and undeveloped regions. And you are missing the point with consumption. I did not mean singularly water consumption. I mean general consumption, over farming, climate change etc.
Originally posted by schrodingers dog
I'm not sure I am getting what you are trying to say. Do you think that this technology is a good or bad idea?
Originally posted by buddhasystem
Originally posted by schrodingers dog
I'm not sure I am getting what you are trying to say. Do you think that this technology is a good or bad idea?
I think that's a swell idea. I also think that it'll make things better in developed areas of the world, located on the shoreline where saltwater is abundant, with limited impact on arid inland regions, or areas becoming such.