Researchers have discovered a way to remove salts from seawater by using a new method that requires less energy to create "drinking water," according to reports.
The technique is called electrochemically mediated seawater desalination. The research involved chemists at the University of Texas and the University of Marburg in Germany, who created a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater.
"The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale," the University of Texas staid in a news release.
The new method requires significantly less energy than other conventional techniques available. In fact, so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery, the University said.
According to the University, it's patent-pending and is in commercial development by startup company Okeanos Technologies. The technique was described last week in the journal Angewandte Chemie:
To achieve desalination, the researchers apply a small voltage (3.0 volts) to a plastic chip filled with seawater. The chip contains a microchannel with two branches. At the junction of the channel an embedded electrode neutralizes some of the chloride ions in seawater to create an "ion depletion zone" that increases the local electric field compared with the rest of the channel. This change in the electric field is sufficient to redirect salts into one branch, allowing desalinated water to pass through the other branch.
According to the Univeristy, the use of this new method would be most beneficial for "the water-stressed areas in which about a third of the planet's inhabitants live." Specifically regions that have access to seawater, but not to the energy required for the desalination process.
"The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health," said Crooks, the Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences in the news release.
"Seawater desalination is one way to address this need, but most current methods for desalinating water rely on expensive and easily contaminated membranes. The membrane-free method we've developed still needs to be refined and scaled up, but if we can succeed at that, then one day it might be possible to provide fresh water on a massive scale using a simple, even portable, system."
To read more about the desalination process, click here.
