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

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