Story TXK9 MIT team invents efficient shockwave-based process for desalination of water.

MIT team invents efficient shockwave-based process for desalination of water.

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in science on (#TXK9)
As the availability of clean, potable water becomes an increasingly urgent issue in many parts of the world, researchers are searching for new ways to treat salty, brackish or contaminated water to make it usable. Now a team at MIT has come up with an innovative approach that, unlike most traditional desalination systems, does not separate ions or water molecules with filters, which can become clogged, or boiling, which consumes great amounts of energy.

Instead, the system uses an electrically driven shockwave within a stream of flowing water, which pushes salty water to one side of the flow and fresh water to the other, allowing easy separation of the two streams.

According to the researchers, this approach is a fundamentally new and different separation system. Unlike most other approaches to desalination or water purification, this one performs a "membraneless separation" of ions and particles.

Membranes in traditional desalination systems, such as those that use reverse osmosis or electrodialysis, are "selective barriers".

They allow molecules of water to pass through, but block the larger sodium and chlorine atoms of salt. Compared to conventional electrodialysis, "This process looks similar, but it's fundamentally different," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmh-DvCmJDs&list=PLK2ccNIJVPpB_XqWWq_oaZGIDzmKiSkYc
Reply 2 comments

press release link (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-11-22 13:30 (#VCM4)

Personally, I would have preferred the article to include this link --
http://news.mit.edu/2015/shockwave-process-desalination-water-1112
The YouTube link is to someone reading the press release...in a bad accent.

Re: press release link (Score: 2, Informative)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-11-25 14:50 (#VQ6B)

Sat in the Pipe for 4 days with no constructive input from anybody. That would have been the time to make changes to it.

In fact there's a dozens of articles piled-up in the pipe right now, some almost three-weeks old, just waiting for a few users to offer up or down-votes to determine if they should go live or be closed.