[mchannon]

Is this a breakthrough? Sure. But it's probably not a panacea.

* Getting actual salt particles out of flows of water is not what their experiment accomplished. They got larger particulates out of the water. The latter is quite easy to do, and the former quite difficult.

* Ionic charge is a very powerful driving force when what you're trying to move has a directionality to it, like a magnet picking up iron filings. This would work great for largely insoluble things like bacteria and mineral particles.

* When salts are dissolved, their constituent parts form ionic dipoles that will work far harder to stay together in solution. A little bit of ionic charge bias presents no challenge to a sodium chloride pair.

* CO2 use in this experiment may be close to zero. After CO2 is injected, it can be recovered and reused (at least in part). Finding a use for the petagrams of CO2 we're dumping in the air is a worthwhile goal but no matter how successful this technology may end up, it won't make a dent.

[T-Winsnes]

Desalinating water is a different problem, with a different solution.

Problem this is looking to solve is cleaning up fresh water that is contaminated, which is in itself a large problem in poorer areas.

[amelius]

> When salts are dissolved, their constituent parts form ionic dipoles that will work far harder to stay together in solution. A little bit of ionic charge bias presents no challenge to a sodium chloride pair.

An electric field of a few volts over a small channel seems to split this dipole just fine, [1].

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/30/desalination-with-small...

[xyzzyz]

As of now, the best that the researchers have achieved is 25% desalination

25% is quite far from "just fine". Has there been any progress on the method in last 4 years?

[amelius]

Repeat the process 10 times, and you're at 95% desalination.

[xyzzyz]

It may or may not work, depending on the details of the process. For instance, the process might only be able to separate the ions if the concentration is high enough. If it's the case, repeating the process on the result will not make any difference.

[erikpukinskis]

Could you just use it on your sewer pipe? That would get us to a sustainable water system pretty fast.

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