Friday, July 07, 2006

Nanotube Water Desalination

Our planet faces a severe water shortage problem. There is the prospect of water wars in many places in the world. But there is a new technology using nanotubes that could reduce the cost of water desalination to one fourth of what it is now.
The new [nanotube-based]membranes, developed by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), could reduce the cost of desalination by 75 percent, compared to reverse osmosis methods used today, the researchers say. The membranes, which sort molecules by size and with electrostatic forces, could also separate various gases, perhaps leading to economical ways to capture carbon dioxide emitted from power plants, to prevent it from entering the atmosphere.



4 comments:

  1. I read something somewhere about another desalinization technology - spray separation desalinization or something like that. It is also supposed to be cheaper.

    The problem is that any country poor enough to fight a resource war is also likely to be too poor to build or attain the technical competence to build desalinization plants of any efficiency.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Can you send me a link?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6:17 AM

    Interesting website with a lot of resources and detailed explanations.
    »

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous8:07 AM

    I think it was something along these lines. Rapid spray desalinization.

    http://www.aquasonics.com/tech.html

    ReplyDelete