Graphene-based sieve separates salt from water, makes seawater drinkable

London : The declining quantity of water has start concerning many scientists these days, because of the increasing demand the total amount of drinking water is coming down.

Some progress is done lately in this concern. Researchers, including one of Indian, have successfully developed a Graphene Based sieve. The quality of this sieve is it can seprate salt from sea water, and makes it clean drinking water for people.

The characteristic of grapheme-oxide membrane is, it become slightly swollen when dispersed in water and smaller salt particles flowing in the water flow through the membrane along with the water , while the larger particles are blocked making the water drinkable.

Researchers from University of Manchester in the U.K. said, ‘’The pore size in the membrane can be precisely controlled, which can sieve common salts out of salty water and make it safe to drink.

The process of graphene working in the water is, when the common salt is dissolved in water, it forms a shell of water molecules around the salt molecules, this allows the graphene oxide membrane to block the salt from flowing with the water. So the water molecules are able to pass easily through the membrane and flow fast which makes it perfect for desalination process.

 “The membranes are not only useful for desalination, but the atomic scale tunability of the pore size also opens new opportunity to fabricate membranes with on-demand filtration capable of filtering out ions according to their sizes,” said Jijo Abraham of University of Manchester.

“Realisation of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology,” said Rahul Nair, professor at University of Manchester.