Is there anything it can’t do? OK, probably, but this is pretty cool:
“Realization of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology,” Rahul Nair, professor of material physics at the University of Manchester, said in a statement.
Previously researchers were unable to remove common salts using the graphene filtering technique, instead removing small nanoparticles and organic molecules.
“This is the first clear-cut experiment in this regime. We also demonstrate that there are realistic possibilities to scale up the described approach and mass produce graphene-based membranes with required sleeve sizes,” Nair added.
It will probably have useful purefying properties in general, but this would be useful for California as well as the Third World.
Might also be good for isotope separation.
I doubt filtering by ion size would work for isotope separation.
Gaseous diffusion was a method employed during WW-II at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
True that gaseous diffusion was used. However, the gas was Uranium Hexafluoride. Using that with atomically thin films of graphene is a good way to generate *lots* of Carbon Tetrafluoride.
I bet it will fail some CA environmental or safety reg. They’d probably prefer to die of thirst than use this (shudder) unnatural material.
It will probably have useful purefying properties in general, but this would be useful for California as well as the rest of the Third World.
FIFY
Even given a superior reverse osmosis membrane, desalination takes energy, which the dunderheads under the Dome in Sac-a-tomato seem intent on rendering to short supply.
Regardless of what tech you have, thermodynamics demands about 4 kJ/mole for this (if I did my chemistry correctly just now). I don’t know how close anything practical is to this limit though.
Mole of what? Water? Salt removed?
Salt removed from water solution. It generates that much heat when it goes into solution, and no perpetual motion machines, so…
Desalination typically doesn’t deliver the salt in solid form, but instead in a waste stream of more concentrated brine. The minimum energy cost comes from entropy considerations (reflected in osmotic pressure differences.)
RO desalination benefits from this really nifty bit of mechanical engineering called a rotary pressure exchanger. It’s like a heat exchanger, but transfers pressure between two fluid streams rather than heat. Pressure in the outgoing waste and fresh water streams is recovered to reduce the pressure the pumps need to supply. This has huge effects on the economics of desalination.
This device was only patented in 1988, remarkably late for such a fundamental invention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_exchanger
Wow! It might be as good as this!