Graphene as a Water Sieve
Graphene is basically a carbon lattice one atom layer thick. It’s been around for only a few years and the guys who made it got a Nobel prize for it. And we’re figuring out how great that material is about once a month. This time, they’re telling us we can use it to desalinate water, to purify it, a thousand times faster than current methods.
The explanation goes something like this: because of one interesting property of graphene, we can make a sheet of it with holes at any size we want, like the size of a water molecule.
It goes like this, this is a water molecule.
This is a salt molecule. (It’s not an actual molecule but stay with me for this)
Salt, when it’s in your salt shaker, looks more like this.
But when it dissolves in water, it looks like this.
The salt compound is made from more massive atoms than water. And with the graphene sheet, we can make holes that let water through and keep salt out. Which basically means that you can pour salt water through a simple filter and get pure water on the other side. Yes, this ideal is still a ways off, there is still work to be done, but this idea is just super cool! Science is awesome! :)
Posted in High-Tech, Less Interesting News by Eran with 7 comments.