New Nano Desalinization Method

lbmouse writes "The Technology Review is reporting that researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have announced a way to use carbon nano-tube technology to reduce the cost of desalination of ocean water by 75 percent over current methods of reverse osmosis. From the article: 'The technology could potentially provide a solution to water shortages both in the United States, where populations are expected to soar in areas with few freshwater sources, and worldwide, where a lack of clean water is a major cause of disease.' The technology may also lead to new ways of eliminating carbon dioxide emitted from power plants."

Comments

Perfect

[Who235]

Now, as sea levels rise, we can just drink it up.

Woo-Hoo!

If it involved boiling the water...

[i kan reed]

We'd probably call it vaporware

Mandatory "Top Secret" reference

[CrystalFalcon]

- Do you realize what this would mean to the starving nations of the planet?

- WOW! They'd have enough salt to last forever!

Small pore, more flow ?

[karvind]

Does anyone have any idea why the small pores have higher flow rate through them ? My classical fluid dynamics class beats me here. Should be something to do with quantum effects at that scale, but can't guess it. Quantization in electronic states makes sense to me, but don't know what it is doing to 'flow dynamics'.

Cool work nevertheless. I wish they could do something with silicon nanowires as silicon is the second most abundant element on earth.

Re:Small pore, more flow ?

[kebes]

I'm reading the original Science article now (sorry, only available to subscribers, although the Science summary may be available to the general public).

The reason that the gas and liquid transport through nanotubes is so much higher than you might expect is due to the smoothness of the inside walls. The classic hydrodynamic equations have some amount of surface roughness inherently built into them. If you just naively scale them down to nano-dimensions, you'll predict very high resistance to fluid flow. However carbon nanotubes have "perfect" inside walls, that are atomically flat. This allows the water molecules (or gas, or whatever travelling inside them) to travel without "getting caught" or "bumping" into defects. In essence the atomic smoothness of the walls brings us into a whole new (nano) hydrodynamic regime.

This effect was predicted by computer simulations previously, but now has been actually observed in real samples. Very impressive.

Orchid fractals

[LiquidCoooled]

I once read something about a class of fractals called >orchids.
They are the result of monitoring crowd flow dynamics and producing the formulas.

They too noticed that for a large crowd (concert, football match) crowd flow speed INCREASES with a number of small gates rather than one large gate, hence one by one through the turnstyles actually makes the process quicker.

This appears to be a similar unintuitive process.

Anyway, I know it wasn't totally on topic I just thought I would share.