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.
Actually I was disappointed with the article.
The image at top shows two output streams: waste, and filtered water. I was expecting an explanation of this while reading the article. But as I read the words, the build-up wasn't matching the image.
Finally we come to: In a working system it would simply be a question of splitting the water stream into three as it left the processor, with the two outer branches being recycled and the inner one tapped and piped to consumers.
So, no, pretty sloppy.
> As the team hoped, this arrangement caused suspended particles with positive surface charges to concentrate towards the CO₂ side of the water stream, and those with negative surface charges to concentrate towards the air side, leaving the centre of the stream more or less particle-free.
* 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.
Problem this is looking to solve is cleaning up fresh water that is contaminated, which is in itself a large problem in poorer areas.
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...
25% is quite far from "just fine". Has there been any progress on the method in last 4 years?
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https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/30/desalination-with-small...
http://news.mit.edu/2015/shockwave-process-desalination-wate...
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/30/desalination-with-small...
If they could capture the CO2 they could already resell it economically as there are lots of uses for it. There was some work in 2012 in Canada on that [1] but it hasn't gone well (here we are 5 years later and there aren't any products yet). There has been work on recapturing the CO2 in new plants, but that doesn't help our 'industrial cities' that are sitting on a bunch of existing infrastructure they cannot afford to refresh given they haven't fully depreciated the existing infrastructure.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-co2-be-captur...
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.
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?
