[HN Gopher] Instant water cleaning method millions of times bett...
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Instant water cleaning method millions of times better than
commercial approach
Author : rootusrootus
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-07-06 22:18 UTC (41 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cardiff.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cardiff.ac.uk)
| grenoire wrote:
| It seems that for both desalination and sanitation (as discussed
| in the article) of water is now an energy issue.
|
| What are some other basic problems (food, water, temperature
| management, etc.) we're facing that are primarily energy-
| bottlenecked?
| shados wrote:
| Time to find a way to move crypto to proof of desalination.
| xfour wrote:
| Waiting for the inevitable explanation of why this is fatally
| flawed and won't work at scale?
| felixfurtak wrote:
| I guess electrolysis of hydrogen from water isn't really a very
| efficient process so would therefore need a lot of energy.
|
| It's the same reason that we're not all driving around in
| hydrogen powered cars.
| tristor wrote:
| Wow, that's incredible. Since it uses electricity for it's energy
| input, this could be readily adapted for use in remote areas
| powered by solar plus battery. Even in Western nations this is a
| boon to treat well water sources instead of shock chlorination.
|
| This combined with GAC filtration can produce very clean water
| anywhere you can get sunlight.
| riknos314 wrote:
| The amount of electricity required wasn't mentioned, so while
| I'm hopeful that you're right I'm worried that the energy
| requirements will be prohibitive to adoption in many areas.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Anytime you read things like 100,000,000 times more effective -
| you should be asking, what was the numerator or denominator in
| this. Or are they just describing some tiny part of the system.
|
| For example, normally you need to filter, do settling for
| sediment etc - how did they solve all this?
|
| Given the orders of magnitude involved here a 5 MGD plant could
| produce 500 trillion gallons per day of "commercial approach"
| water cleaning. The water handling issues alone in doing 500
| trillion GPD seem large. Am I missing something?
| pitched wrote:
| I just hope the Reactive Oxygen Species that are 10M times more
| lethal to bacteria aren't equally more lethal to humans. Also, if
| this requires electrolysis-level power, it might still not be
| worth it in most cases.
| gundmc wrote:
| How much gold and palladium are required? Those are massively
| expensive catalysts and it feels borderline disingenuous to talk
| about how this will bring clean drinking water to the masses
| without so much as mentioning cost.
| perihelions wrote:
| To gloss what "reactive oxygen species" means:
|
| > _" reactive oxygen species--which include hydroxyl,
| hydroperoxyl and superoxide radicals--"_
|
| https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/140418/
|
| (The paper is not open-access).
| Someone1234 wrote:
| This sounds very cool.
|
| Though I wish this article addressed some of the questions I had
| around commercialization, namely the cost of the gold +
| palladium, the expected lifecycle, and the expected maintenance
| routine (e.g. do they have to be regularly removed and cleaned?).
|
| The article makes great arguments for why this should work (i.e.
| hydrogen peroxide is already being used, this just short-circuits
| how we get a known effective cleaning agent, reducing/removing
| logistics inefficiencies). So a lot of the question is: Is this
| cheaper/less hassle than buying stabilized hydrogen peroxide
| commercially?
|
| A lot of these fantastic advances often end up in the black hole,
| wherein they work as advertised, but the financials/logistics
| never line up and therefore nobody uses them in anger.
| mackatsol wrote:
| The article was very vague... I'll wait for the paper to come
| out!
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(page generated 2021-07-06 23:00 UTC)