Sounds like a promising piece of technology. What I'm more impressed with, though, is the scientific journalism.<p>It's balanced, accurate, accessible, representative, and leaves out the hyperbole. I would pay for science journalism that read like this. Even better if it came with some biased, inflammatory, hyperbolic editorials on the side.
Is this a breakthrough? Sure. But it's probably not a panacea.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.
Maybe this could be combined with electric field desalination to make seawater potable:<p><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/30/desalination-with-small-electrical-fields-simple-new-method-may-revolutionize-seawater-desalination/" rel="nofollow">https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/30/desalination-with-small...</a><p><a href="http://news.mit.edu/2015/shockwave-process-desalination-water-1112" rel="nofollow">http://news.mit.edu/2015/shockwave-process-desalination-wate...</a>
Nice, other than the necessity of dumping CO2 into the air. I wonder if he tried creating an electric field across the water as some folks have done for desalination[1]. Any pollutant with a net positive or negative charge would be suitably diverted in that way.<p>[1] <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/30/desalination-with-small-electrical-fields-simple-new-method-may-revolutionize-seawater-desalination/" rel="nofollow">https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/30/desalination-with-small...</a>
> he imagines [the necessary CO2] would come from power stations and other industrial processes, such as cement-making, that produce the gas in large quantities as exhaust.<p>IANAC, but it seems like that just exchanges one problem for another. I imagine that most, if not all, of the industrial processes that produce CO2 exhaust gases also result in other gases and particles getting into the exhaust stream, meaning that you'd have to refine/filter the exhaust from those processes to get just the CO2.
Sunlight (specifically, UV radiation) does a pretty good job of killing pathogens: <a href="http://www.sodis.ch/methode/index_EN" rel="nofollow">http://www.sodis.ch/methode/index_EN</a> . Though it doesn't remove any non-biological contaminants; this one might be better at that.<p>But if it needs an industrial process to do this anyway, is this one significantly cheaper/easier than what's used in the developed world?
This is cool, particularly in the simplicity of the approach. Reminds me of how a septic tank works but at a much finer scale with the CO2 augmenting gravity.
This is really cool in its simplicity and sustainability.
People get obsessed with complex tech (e.g. high energy fusion). Sometimes I think that the ultimate limits of high tech look low tech to the unappreciative.
You can make virtually any water source potable by boiling it. It so happens hot water has other useful purposes as well so why are we not showing those 1.8B people how to efficiently boil water? What am I not getting?