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New Plastic to Cut CO2 Emissions and Purify Water
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers have lots of imagination. After developing plastic as solid as steel, other scientists from in Australia, Korea and in the U.S. have created a plastic which could cut CO2 emissions and purify water. Their new material mimics pores found in plants and is exceptionally efficient. As said one of the lead researchers, 'it can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas.' Now it remains to be seen if commercial companies are interested, either for water desalination or for natural gas processing plants."
"could cut" becomes "to cut". Probably previously in the chain there's a "might cut". No wonder we get so many hyped technologies that never deliver.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We'll just sit here in the pumpkin patch, and you can see the Great Pumpkin with your OWN EYES.
...sailing the sausage seas!
Can any medical types address the application of this material to artificial kidneys?
"Plastics, son, plastics."
Hyperic Community Manager
Well I read TFA and the concept behind that plastic is deceptively simple: It is a membrane consisting of hourglass-shaped pores, which seemingly is a very efficient shape for pores and is also used in plant cell membranes.
So in essence, this plastic is a plant membrane in plastic form, which is not a radically advanced concept, but a really clever one and if it works as advertised, kudos to the research teams.
... will the CO2 emission from producing the plastic be worth the amount saved by using it?
Well, those who innovate turn once again to Parental Nature for inspiration; not entirely surprising seeing Parental Nature either has:
I just hope enough of Parental Nature is around the place for long enough before we lose the wealth of knowledge and technology which we can copy.
If you're implying I lack complete understanding here - you're right. But all that I've seen of filtering plastics have been macroscopic plastic forms that either hold a solution in a shape that maximizes some process (evaporation, condensation), or are otherwise just the container for the real filtering process. The single-piece plastic with inherent filtering properties like a cell wall is what seems new to me.
Ryan Fenton
does "as solid as steel" mean?
This space available.
Surely that's a highly toxic metal (at least its compounds are)? Does that cancel out the good this will do?
-1 not first post
Linux is already pure ;)
The hope is that the may be the or one of the few steps necessary to making water desalination reasonable on a massive level. For example, the Western States of the US are in constant bickering over limited water rights. This and similar technologies may bring water desalination costs down to a point where such worries about fresh water are unnecessary.
I know a lot of people love to point to conservation, but cities like Los Angeles are already conserving a lot of water. Urban areas in California only use around 10% of fresh water in the state, with agriculture using most of the rest.
I would like to see a plastic that can purify ethanol, instead of using the extremely inefficient method of boiling to distill the ethanol. All that boiling is one of the big reasons ethanol is impractical in the US. (we don't have the climate for sugarcane)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Perhaps they're referring to the state? Although if it's a plastic, it's probably an amorphous solid and lacks a crystalline structure like steel.
What happens to the plastic membrane after it absorbs the CO2? Does it get recycled? thrown out? Burned?
There is a catch, of course: Plastics are often derived from oil.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
No. The question is "Will it Blend"?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
There _are_ other issues with desalination, other than cost. Like, what do you do with the salty brine by-product? Tip it back into the ocean? That could cause environmental problems.
Still, on a small scale, a cheap and efficient desalination product would be brilliant! I'd certainly buy a handheld version, when I go camping near the ocean.
It doesn't change the fact that we use plastics more often than we should. Melting plastic requires significantly more energy than melting glass. Recycling plastic also requires significantly more energy than recycling glass. Additionally, plastic can only be recycled a few times. Glass, on the other hand, has a much longer life.
How about we bring back the glass bottles? We're already losing the glass beer bottles to plastic ones. I say we reverse the tide, and go back to glass Coke bottles. And wouldn't it be nice if those milk jugs were actually re-used?
I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't find better plastics. All I'm saying is that I think, in addition to researching new plastics, we take time to look at the alternatives to plastics. Sometimes the old-fashioned methods work just as well, if not better, than new methods. You havn't seen a more efficient wheel invented in the last few thousand years, have you?
Now now, the CSIRO are actually a respectable scientific body that research and develop countless products, dont believe me? Have a look at 802.11n (for example)
From the Article:
"This plastic will help solve problems of small molecule separation, whether related to clean coal technology, separating greenhouse gases, increasing the energy efficiency of water purification, or producing and delivering energy from hydrogen," Dr Anita Hill of CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering said.
"The ability of the new plastic to separate small molecules surpasses the limits of any conventional plastics."
"It can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas."
All wishy washyness about the abilities of the substance is the editorialising of slashdot and the writer of the article
(802.11n link with a fairly complete look at the picture: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070924-dark-australian-patent-cloud-looms-over-802-11n-spec.html though it does kind of skirt around the fact that the CSIRO were ripped off in the past by the worldwide adoption clause and they are attempting to avoid the same again )
Can't we all just get along
It's like sulfur. If you were to commercially mine coal just for the sulfur, you'd lose money competing with other sulfur sources. But scrubbing sulfur from coal smoke to comply with environmental rules extracts the sulfur anyway. The result has been a total collapse of the commercial sulfur-mining industry as power plants try to sell off the huge stockpiles of sulfur they're amassing.
Similarly, high-concentration brine is an excellent source of salt. Other sources of salt are currently economically competitive with and even somewhat superior to extraction from seawater. But the byproduct brine from a commercially viable desalination plant will be much more concentrated; converting that into salt will be much cheaper than direct extraction from seawater. Throw in environmental rules against just dumping the brine, and you wind up with lots of cheap salt replacing other commercial sources.
True, you might wind up with impressive stockpiles of salt after a while (like we have with sulfur), but that's just an open invitation for somebody to develop a productive use for it all. (Gasoline was once just a mostly-useless byproduct of kerosene production . . . ) Fill in the existing salt mines with it, maybe.
"Melting plastic requires significantly more energy than melting glass."
I hold in my hands a plastic bottle and a glass bottle, both used to have beer in them.
I take my butane lighter, spark it, and hold the flame to the bottom of the plastic. Within seconds, it's melting and burning. I do that to the glass bottle, and I'll burn thru that whole lighter's fuel supply (which is energy) before I even turn the glass red.
I'll say it probably takes more energy to melt glass rather than plastic.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
- it separates small molecules from larger ones very quickly
- at a higher purity level than current membranes,
- and it does so at a higher temperature.
What this presumably means is that a properly used filter could be used to clean up combustion related gases, etc., returning the unburned hydrocarbons to a burner perhaps, and allowing the the remaining C02 and water molecules to be further processed later on.The next step in the line is the one that I think is the holy grail here -- to be able to separate the water and H20 from the exhaust air stream for sequestration and whatever the presumably purified water vapor would be useful for....Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Well, you _are_ changing the total amount of water in the sea, otherwise what is the use of desalination? But that is a nit-pick, because you are correct, if you consider the _entire_ sea, the net effect will be close to zero.
But I'm not talking about net effect. Concentrated brine will kill life on the seabed, and it will kill it for many kilometres around the pipes, depending on the topography, of course. It sounds like you don't understand how concentrated brine acts in seawater. If you think it'll naturally disperse quickly, you've got a big surprise waiting. If unagitated, brine will sink to the bottom of the sea, and will hang around for a long, long time. You'll actually have a lake of brine form, and it is visibly different to the normal seawater above it. All this can quite quickly disrupt or kill off the ecosystem in a much larger area than the brine itself takes up.
The net salt content of the whole sea will be close to the same as before, but now you've destroyed any life in the area. Now you know the dangers of thinking in terms of "net effect".