Scientists from the United Kingdom have fashioned a sieve membrane that is made up from graphene. The membrane is said to have the ability to filter water that is fine for human consumption from the salty water found in our seas.
The project lead by scientists based in the United Kingdom gets us a little closer to the dream of providing clean water to many people across the globe without access to “clean water”.
The team at the University of Manchester (where colleagues won a Nobel Prize in 2010 for first extracting graphene) have achieved to control the exact size of the pores in a graphene oxide sieve that allows them to sieve out harmful salts from the seawater making it safe to drink.
The announcement was made on Monday, in the Nature Nanotechnology journal.
Now days, countries are spending a lot of time into “desalination” technologies, as climate change shrinks the water supplies of cities around the world.
By 2025, the United Nation predicts that fourteen percent of the entire population on earth will experience water shortages, that’s around 1.2 billion people.
"Realisation of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology.
"This is the first clear-cut experiment in this regime.
"We also demonstrate that there are realistic possibilities to scale up the described approach and mass produce graphene-based membranes with required sieve sizes."
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