Posted on 02/28/2018 6:15:36 PM PST by upchuck
Scaling up from a postage stamp to a usable size???
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"Without the film, the filtration rate dropped by half in 72 hours. A membrane with the graphene film, by contrast, keeps working even as it’s coated with oil, detergents, or other contaminants."
At least, try reading the excerpt, next time...
“Their product is also made from soybean oil, making it more sustainable than graphene made from fossil fuels. In the future, the researchers say, it could be made with waste oil.”
It is SICKENING when otherwise useful articles go off-topic with this crap. It’s like Tesla bragging about putting solar panels on their charging stations when those panels, at most, can provide 1% of the energy needed by the cars using those stations.
I always read the article. It's poorly written, so I read others. The graphene is used over a conventional polymer membrane to keep the latter from fouling. The polymer membrane is removing the salt, not the graphene. That's how conventional MF works to desalinize water.
Getting the energy cost/requirements down for desalinization processes is a good thing, any day.
You still have the briny residue to get rid of; but in recent years there has been some breakthroughs in converting the brine to useful chemicals/materials.
Whole industries will be built around Graphene ... what a God send...
Whenever this stuff is ready for prime time—it will make desalinated water cheap enough for agriculture and double the size of habitable earth,
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