The key to withstanding such high pressures, the
Rohit Karnik, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, says the team's results, reported today in the journal Nano Letters serve as a guideline for designing tough, graphene-based membranes, particularly for applications such as desalination, in which filtration membranes must withstand high-pressure flows to efficiently remove salt from seawater.
"We're showing here that graphene has the potential to push the boundaries of high-pressure membrane separations," Karnik says. "If graphene-based membranes could be developed to do desalination at high pressure, then it opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for energy-efficient desalination at high salinities."
Karnik's co-authors are lead author and MIT postdoc Luda Wang, former undergraduate student Christopher Williams, former graduate student Michael Boutilier, and postdoc Piran Kidambi.
Water stressed
Today's existing membranes desalinate water via reverse osmosis, a process by which pressure is applied to one side of a membrane containing saltwater, to push pure water across the membrane while salt and other molecules are prevented from filtering through.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-graphene-high-pressure.html#jCp
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