Posted on 03/18/2013 7:34:33 PM PDT by shove_it
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A 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...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Cheaper desalination technology would be a boon to mankind, but the reporting in this article on how Lockheed-Martin’s advance works is sorely lacking. Salt, or in general any water-soluble ionic substance, is not present in water as molecules, but dissociated as ions (for ordinary salt Na+ and Cl- in equal numbers).
you could also return it to the ocean with the water that comes through the sewage as well without changing conditions at all.
That assumes the salt removed is returned to the ocean.
Being third to say that is what I get for using my cell to freep.
If you extract the salt and you do not drop it back into the ocean, the seawater would remain constant. Of course you would have mountains of salt laying about.
True, but the real situation is that those two highly charged ions are surrounded by a tight cluster of water molecules, bound to the ions by ion-dipole bonds. It is the total size of the cluster than matters.
Really? They call Lockheed, one of the largest companies in the world just a ‘pentagon weapons maker’?
Yep, the question has to be asked - where did the “salt” (and other minerals) come from in the first place? The land. Rain. Rivers. Erosion. Ocean.
Now, an aside. Give the current rate of depositing of salts in the ocean, how “salty” should the ocean be if it were billions of years old?
In certain societal situations,
salt is gold.
The word “salary” comes from the fact that people were paid in salt at one time.
If they could miniaturize this it would be great having one on every lifeboat.
Sure sounds like it might... If this works as advertised, it may be the most revolutionary invention since the computer. Solves a LOT of the potential global warming problems.
FYI, June 2012 article about graphene as an investment.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article35259.html
Lots of other articles out there about companies and their R&D efforts as it relates to graphene.
Well, you could just answer that theoretical lib argument by promising to dump all the town’s wastewater back into the ocean to complete the water cycle. Oops, they wouldn’t like that either, would they?
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