A Hyper-Efficient Water Filter to Desalinate Seawater has been Developed, by a Lab at Zhejiang University in China

Researchers Zhe Tan et al.* from Zhejiang University in China have developed a filter that is more than tripling efficient than the currently popular ones on the market. In their paper Polyamide Membranes with Nanoscale Turing Structures for Water Purification, they credited the inspiration to famous English mathematician and biologist Alan Turing’s “Turing structures” in 1952.

 
The researchers brought two different antagonistic substances spreading at various rates to combine a membrane. As the membrane developed, a structure of intertwined nanotubes in repeating patterns was produced.
 
When testing this structure, the Chinese scientists realized that it can function as an efficient water filter, which is capable of filtering at five times atmospheric pressure and completely removing large salts such as magnesium chloride and sulfate instantaneously. Unfortunately, for salts with a small diameter, such as table salt which is composed of sodium chloride, the filter can only filter out half of the salt. 

 
The “Turing filter,” which has been named the professor running the study, could be used to pretreat seawater, so that the membranes downstream will not be clogged. We could also imagine “Turing filter”’s other application, such as treating industrial wastewater or purifying brackish water.

*Reseach group include Zhe Tan, Shengfu Chen, Xinsheng Peng, Lin Zhang, Congjie Gao.

To read more, please visit:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6388/518

https://www.planet.veolia.com/en/news/desalination-seawater-innovation-filter-china