This website uses cookies and similar technologies to deliver its services, to analyse and improve performance and to provide personalised content and advertising. Information about your use of this website will be shared with Google and other third parties. Read our privacy policy.
By Neil Goalby 2022-05-20T07:40:00+01:00
Students are looking to mangroves for inpiration to turn salty seawater to safe drinkable water
Use the summary starter slide for lessons on making drinking water using reverse osmosis with your 14–16 students.
Four students in the US have designed a desalinating water bottle. The currently hypothetical device would be compact and portable.
Their design is inspired by mangrove trees, which use thermal and membrane-based desalination techniques to grow in saltwater in the tropics. It includes an input chamber, which users fill with saltwater, connected to a reverse osmosis membrane. Water filters via the membrane into an intermediate chamber connected to a synthetic leaf. The leaf consists of a nanoporous membrane on a microporous mesh. On evaporation, the water menisci within the pores become concave resulting in a negative pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the surface. This creates suction that can overcome reverse osmosis at the filter, resulting in desalination.
The group says the design has several advantages over existing work on synthetic trees. They added a solar fin around the bottle to accelerate the rate at which the water would flow through the filter. This would increase the transpiration rate, ensuring the process is faster than previously reported devices. The bottle is intended for personal and community use by people who don’t have sufficient access to clean water; the proposed single column structure ensures the device is portable.
As the design is only preliminary, the next step for the team would be to create a prototype. Constructing a physical device would involve addressing the challenge of material costs to ensure the device is accessible for the intended users.
Read the full story in Chemistry World.
A one-slide summary of this article with questions to use with your 14–16 students: rsc.li/3MpVAi2
Extent of pharmaceutical pollution on every continent on Earth revealed
Use this starter slide to begin your lessons on drinking water and water treatment with some historical context
Video resource showing how to purify water to make it ‘potable’ and how to test it.
Designer catalysts are breaking the known rules of reactions
The Moon’s surface offers potential for ‘extraterrestrial photosynthesis’ to make oxygen, hydrogen and other fuels
Look at the life cycle of solar panels suffering from a dusting of silica
Site powered by Webvision Cloud