Researchers have designed a battery that desalinates saltwater.
The saltwater is pushed between a pair electrodes: a silver
electrode, which attracts chlorine ions, and an electrode made of
manganese oxide nanorods, which attracts the sodium ions. To remove the
ions from the electrodes, a separate stream of saltwater moves between
the electrodes in the opposite direction.
Mauro Pasta and Fabio La Mantia of Ruhr University Bochum and Colin
D. Wessells and Yi Cui of Stanford University wrote up the discovery in Nano Letters.
The discovery comes out of previous research by Pasta, La Mantia, Cui,
and Heather D. Deshazer of Stanford University and Bruce Logan of Penn
State University to find sources of clean energy. In that research, saltwater of varying salinity was pushed between the electrodes to create an electric current.
Right now, the technology can remove 50% of the original salt in a
single pass-through. Pushing the water through the battery several times
removed more of the salt, but that takes energy. The researchers intend
to improve on their discovery until a single pass-through creates
potable water from seawater.
Potential in a Battery
The original paper is behind a paywall, so all the details aren’t
available to me, but it seems like this battery holds a lot of
potential.
If the water were pushed between the electrodes by a free source of
energy, like the incoming tide, would it also create electricity at the
same time? Even if it didn’t create energy, the ebb and flow of the tide
would provide the energy needed to desalinate water and then clean the
electrodes.
No comments:
Post a Comment