Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Graphene: Can Improve Desalination Efficiency by Several Orders of Magnitude... It Can Do Pretty Much Anything

A new approach to water desalination





Desalination works exactly as you might expect; you run water through a filter with pores small enough to block the salt and not the water. It’s a process called reverse osmosis. The issue is that the thicker your filter is, the less efficient the process is going to be. If you know anything about graphene, you know where this is going. Graphene sheets are one atom thick. It’s sort of a best case scenario. Because it’s nanoporous and so insanely thin, it can let water (but not salt) through it without requiring the comparatively high levels of pressure that current filters do.


We may not have jetpacks or flying cars yet, but graphene is looking like it may prove to be the sort of infinitely useful space age material that always gets such stupid names in sci-fi movies. And if the past is any indication, this isn’t the end of graphene’s application potential. Any bets on what’s next?
Source: phys.org