alt Hacker NewsNew method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste
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Awesome, love seeing stuff out of Rochester - RIT or UofR or any of the nearby schools.
Totally underrated area for academic pursuits.
This appears to be the same New Rochester article as 4 days ago with 20 comments.
"in mice". No, wait, that auto-reply is for cancer breakthrough.
Let me check, is that a wonderful battery ? Nope.. A promising fusion ? Neither...
Ok, so this must be the fourth kind of pseudo-wonder discovery that will maybe make it out of the lab in 20 years, if the research team managed to get scraps of funding while VC pick the next way to waste pensioners money.
Anyway, whenever they have desalinated enough water to get each researcher a pint, the round is on me.
This reads like hyperbole:
> The brine byproduct wreaks havoc on sea life when it’s deposited back into the ocean by raising the salt level and lowering oxygen in the water.
Managing return of concentrated brine should be entirely tractable in the literal ocean.
> without waste
...except for the huge piles of salt.
If the salt was not waste, surely people would already be extracting it from the brine and the existing methods would also be "without waste".
What about removing oil from water, have we conquered that yet?
There is a fundamental minimum amount of energy needed to desalinate: you can't take less energy to do it,than you could gain back (from osmotic pressure) if you allowed the desalinated water to expand a cylinder containing the residual brine. This is large. This paper is a thermal method, so it doesn't have an electricity input, but to justify their efficiency claim, they should really compare against what you could do by using the same surface area for solar panels, driving a conventional setup. My (limited) understanding is that conventional reverse osmosis is not far from the theoretical optimum, energy-wise, the main difficulties being operational (the membranes need declogging). And of course RO is more expensive than rain.
This paper is interesting, however, in directly producing crystalline salt, which is lower volume than brine and easier to dispose of, maybe even valuable.