Scientists Can Purify Sea Water In A Cheap & Easy Way, Can Solve ...

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AllNewsAppsScience And FutureTechnologyScience And FutureScientists Can Purify Sea Water In A Cheap & Easy Way, Can Solve World's Drinking Water CrisisScientists Can Purify Sea Water In A Cheap & Easy Way, Can Solve World's Drinking Water Crisis

Right now, we’re polluting our water bodies daily with plastic, affluents, and more. On top of that, the warming planet a potential water crisis in future. So a group of researchers has been working out a cheap way to make seawater potable.

Gwyn D'MelloUpdated: May 28, 2019, 11:50 IST

Right now, we're polluting our water bodies daily with plastic, effluents, and more. On top of that, the warming planet means a lot of inland water bodies might dry up, putting us in a water crisis.

So a group of researchers has been working out a way to make seawater potable.

Researchers at Columbia University just announced that they've found a way to do just that, remove the salt in seawater, so we can use it for drinking and irrigation. Quick and easy desalination has long-since been a focus of many scientists, and this might be the biggest breakthrough in years.

The process is called Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction and it focuses on purifying water with a high concentration of salts, up to seven times more salty than regular seawater. That's because a lot of industrial processes involved in oil and gas production output this kind of hypersaline brine, which is dumped into our environment. Purifying it can not only create more water, but stop the pollution of our rivers and groundwater.

The process itself is complicated, but can be explained fairly simply based on their demonstration. A solvent (dyed red in the demo) is added to the salty water and the two appear to stay separated. But after the mixture is heated and the red liquid decanted into another container, the scientists are left with a layer of clear water underneath it.

Based on their results, the team was able to remove up to a whopping 98.4 percent of the salt in the water, which is equivalent to the current method of desalination, reverse osmosis. But unlike the latter, the temperature swing method doesn't require high temperatures or pressures.

That makes it easier to carry out with basic apparatus, not to mention a lot cheaper.

The scientists also say it can be easily scaled up to an industrial level, so a factory's brine water output can be treated at the source, and drinking water obtained.

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