Sunday 29 November 2015

Water, Water, Every Where, Nor Any Drop To Drink,

are a couple of lines from a poem,


The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in fact, written by SamuelTaylor Coleridge, it tells of the mariners voyage where he famously shot the albatross, and his lack of water, but if MIT’s Professor Martin Bazant manages to upscale his teams latest work producing fresh water from seawater the mariners fresh water problem would have been solved using Professor Bazant's inexpensive procedure, his team shocks the water sample and has successfully removed over 99 percent of salts while recovering up to 79 percent of the water used in the experiments, they also found it can remove various contaminants such as dirt and bacteria, this how it works, a small electric current is applied across the sintered glass material and the salt ions gather on one side of the flow, in turn creating an ion-rich side and an ion-deficient side, once the current is increased sufficiently, the charged surface of the porous glass essentially generates a shockwave that divides the flowing water into two separate streams, one with desalinated drinking water and the other with salt, the two streams are separated at the centre of the flow, the group published their findings on November 3 in the journal Environmental Science Technology, in a recent press release, the researchers noted that the system they’re working on “opens up a whole range of new possibilities for water desalination, both from seawater and brackish water resources, such as groundwater.” one can only wish the team success when so much of the world needs cheaply produced fresh drinking water.


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