ABOUT US | QUARK PRIZES | DAG-3QD SYMPOSIA | MONDAY MAGAZINE | ARCHIVES | FOLLOW US |

3 Quarks Daily Advertising

 

 

 

 

Please Subscribe to 3QD

Subscription options:

If you would like to make a one time donation in any amount, please do so by clicking the "Pay Now" button below. You may use any credit or debit card and do NOT need to join Paypal.

The editors of 3QD put in hundreds of hours of effort each month into finding the daily links and poem as well as putting out the Monday Magazine and doing all the behind-the-scenes work which goes into running the site.

If you value what we do, please help us to pay our editors very modest salaries for their time and cover our other costs by subscribing above.

We are extremely grateful for the generous support of our loyal readers. Thank you!

3QD on Facebook

3QD on Twitter

3QD by RSS Feed

3QD by Daily Email

Receive all blogposts at the same time every day.

Enter your Email:


Preview 3QD Email

Recent Comments

Powered by Disqus

Miscellany

Design and Photo Credits

The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

The banner images have been provided by Terri Amig, Carla Goller, Tom Hilde, Georg Hofer, Sheherbano Husain, Margit Oberrauch, S. Abbas Raza, Sughra Raza, Margaret Scurlock, Shahzia Sikander, Maria Stockner, and Hartwig Thaler.

« Tony Karon: Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You! | Main | Pakistan’s Extremist Democracy »

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Lockheed Martin finds way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater

David Alexander in Reuters:

300px-GraphenA defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin - just one atom in thickness - it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.

The development could spare underdeveloped countries from having to build exotic, expensive pumping stations needed in plants that use a desalination process called reverse osmosis.

"It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger," said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. "The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less."

More here.


Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:05 AM | Permalink

comments powered by Disqus