One of the global issues we face today is the shortage of water supply. The problem is caused not just by the lack of natural sources that give off clean water, but also by human-induced climate change.
To prevent the total absence of water supply, many experts developed their own solutions for reproduction. Among the most popular techniques is seawater desalination. In this approach, the widely available liquid on our planet is purified to produce safe drinking water.
Nanotechnology and Seawater Desalination
Many plants are already using seawater desalination. Globally, the volume of water from the ocean that is being purified sums up to 97.4 million cubic meters per single day. The conventional approach to this process could be carried out through either reverse osmosis or thermal osmosis.
The problem with these water desalination options is that, despite their effectiveness at producing clean drinking water, the process itself takes too much energy.
In a new research on water cleansing, experts from Japan developed a novel system that could desalinate seawater faster and more efficiently than most of the current machines we have at our time. This innovation uses the power of nanotechnology and fluorous structures to achieve cost-effective and time-saving water purification.
Fluorine was chosen by the authors due to its water-repellent effects similar to what it does in Teflon-coated kitchenwares. This lightweight material is hydrophobic due to its fluorous composition. There are other plants that already use fluorine-based coats in larger pipelines and other waterways.
The development, led by scholars from the University of Tokyo, modified this property into a nanoscale membrane to filter out salt from smaller amounts of water.
Nanomembranes Made of Hydrophobic Carbon-Fluorine Rings Discovered Effective Filters for Saltwater
Tokyo School of Engineering's Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology specialist Yoshimitsu Itoh, who served as co-author of the research, explained that their team tested the filtering capacity of the fluorous nanochannel with water and salt.
Following the series of computer simulations, the model showed promising efficacy in cleansing water, Itoh added.
The team was able to construct fluorine-based nanoscopic rings that scaled from 0.9 to two nanometers, a measure that is significantly smaller compared to the 100,000-nanometer size of a human hair strand.
The rings were coated with a hydrophobic surface that contains a dense molecular bond of carbon and fluorine, Cosmos reported. With this property, the rings would be able to repel water effectively. Each ring was stacked to form a strong, impermeable lipid membrane.
Itoh said that the model demonstrated what the calculations expected, as each of the tests showed perfect rejection of salt molecules as seawater passed through the membranes. Both small and large-scale tests had positive results that even exceeded the performance of the current technologies we have today.
The model worked a thousand times faster compared to the conventional industrial machines and was 2,400 times faster compared to the hypothetical carbon nanotube desalination devices, Itoh continued.
The study was published in the journal Science, titled "Ultrafast water permeation through nanochannels with a densely fluorous interior surface."
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