Potentially VERY good news! http://www.chron.com/news/houston-t...nto-fresh-water-with-a-4679663.php?cmpid=hpts Chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany are on the verge of a breakthrough in the worldwide quest for potable water. The new method requires so little energy, in fact, that it can run on a store-bought battery. By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, the chemists have found a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques, according to a press release from UT-Austin. The process avoids the problems confronting current desalination methods by separating salt from water at a microscale. The technique, called electrochemically mediated seawater desalination, was described last week in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The research team was led by Richard Crooks of The University of Texas at Austin and Ulrich Tallarek of the University of Marburg. It's patent-pending and is in commercial development by startup company Okeanos Technologies, according to the release. "The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health," Crooks stated. "Seawater desalination is one way to address this need, but most current methods for desalinating water rely on expensive and easily contaminated membranes. "The membrane-free method we've developed still needs to be refined and scaled up, but if we can succeed at that, then one day it might be possible to provide fresh water on a massive scale using a simple, even portable, system." How it works: To achieve desalination, the researchers apply a small voltage (3.0 volts) to a plastic chip filled with seawater. The chip contains a microchannel with two branches. At the junction of the channel an embedded electrode neutralizes some of the chloride ions in seawater to create an "ion depletion zone" that increases the local electric field compared with the rest of the channel. The change in the electric field is sufficient to redirect salts into one branch, allowing desalinated water to pass through the other branch. The new method holds particular promise for the water-stressed areas where about a third of the planet's inhabitants live. Many of these regions have access to abundant seawater but not to the energy infrastructure or money necessary to desalinate water using conventional technology. As a result, millions of deaths per year in these regions are attributed to water-related causes, according to the release. "People are dying because of a lack of freshwater," said Tony Frudakis, founder and CEO of Okeanos Technologies. "And they'll continue to do so until there is some kind of breakthrough, and that is what we are hoping our technology will represent." So far, Crooks and his team have achieved 25 percent desalination. Although drinking water requires 99 percent desalination, they are confident that goal can be achieved. "This was a proof of principle," Knust stated. "We've made comparable performance improvements while developing other applications based on the formation of an ion depletion zone. That suggests that 99 percent desalination is not beyond our reach."
This scale up is going to be tough. The amount of energy to be able to mobilize the ions in a significant volume of water will be vast! I don't think it will be that much more energy-saving when trying to get to 99% desalination. Still, it's nice that they're researching into it - clean water will become precious soon enough. There's just too many people in the world and too little resources to sustain them.
Their is a company in Eugene Oregon that has proven they can do this. They refuse to sell the technology to governments. Clean water is more of an epidemic than food
If this becomes a reality, WHAT THE F are ships going to travel on?!?!?! No, but seriously... there's a reason for the WATER CYCLE, ladies and gentlemen... and forcing it won't help. Don't **** UP water like we did oil.
Toilet to tap is the most efficient method. If you're already treating wastewater, you might as well go one step further and do reverse osmosis. It's way more energy-efficient than desalination.
That is what I was thinking. I've heard of similar ideas to this but the problem always seems how do you scale them up.
I was going more towards developed countries. Even so, desalination isn't a cure-all, because the desalinated water still has contaminants.
How does this affect my purchase of Fiji Water? Fiji Water made from the purest substance on Earth. Fiji Water.
I understand the apprehension, but it seems like this system will be relatively cheap, efficient and able to implemented without massive infrastructure. Translation = this most likely geared towards developing countries. This is not like oil where the end product cannot be recycled or contributes to pollution. At the end of the day, the transformed water will likely end up where it was recovered from thanks to the water cycle. However I will say this, all these new technologies are still going to be heavily dependent on the energy industry (coal, oil, wind, etc.) We have got to develop more efficient methods of energy generation/transportation.
Don't need it. I've spent the last 6 years adapting to the consumption of salt water as fresh water substitute.
They need to hurry up and do this, make it work, run a pipeline to the Gulf and fill Lake Travis back up, dammit. Like yesterday.
