This looks like it could be a breakthrough new process.
As usual, though there’s probably a catch, in terms of scalability. Also, it doesn’t discuss it, but it seems like it should be even easier with seawater.
12 thoughts on “Desalination”
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It looks useful but the blurb says this will help deal with waste water but doesn’t it just salvage some useful water leaving behind the problem stuff in a more concentrated form? We need something productive to use the discarded material from the process.
Well, in many cases the salt residue can be put on steak or french fries.
Maybe Martian salt will be a big export.
If this works on the large scale, you run sea water in and run somewhat saltier sea water out one pipe and fresh water out the other (where it can be piped upstream and dumped into a river to help keep bait fish alive).
I’m not sure that mucking up the salinity of oceans is a great idea.
Possibly not, but I think if you picked the right spot for your desalination plant that you’d have a real hard time noticing. But it’s certainly enough for environmentalists to shut it down just after it starts up, particularly in California.
You’d have to process a whole heap lot of sea water to notice the increase in salinity. Especially when the water eventually drains back to the oceans.
I think I heard someone once say that getting salt out in brine is the easy bit. The problem is filtering the salt when it is at a low concentration, like in the ocean, which is where most of the water is.
Doctor Flamond: You see, a year ago, I was close to perfecting the first magnetic desalinization process so revolutionary, it was capable of removing the salt from over 500 million gallons of seawater a day. Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth?
Nick Rivers: Wow. They’d have enough salt to last forever.
Top Secret (My favorite “missing the point” joke of all time)
– Article impeaches itself in the first fragment of a sentence. Linked article https://engineering.columbia.edu/press-releases/ngai-yin-yip-radical-desalination avoids the error.
– No mention of how much energy is needed, just that it works with low grade heat. AH, a chart at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.9b00182# , uses more energy than membrane extraction, but less than evaporation. Also other technical details.
Water works in a cycle. We have not yet learned how to destroy it in large quantities. How about a nuclear power plant on the coast every 35 miles, but instead of tall cooling towers, use boilers to cool the spent steam. That would give a steady supply of base-load power, with distilled water as a by-product. And salt. And other products that accumulate from boiling lots of water.
Oh look, they read chemistry journals from the 1920’s. How cute.