SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for AzumaHazuki
Radical Desalination Approach May Disrupt the Water Industry
Hypersaline brines—water that contains high concentrations of dissolved salts and whose saline levels are higher than ocean water—are a growing environmental concern around the world. Very challenging and costly to treat, they result from water produced during oil and gas production, inland desalination concentrate, landfill leachate (a major problem for municipal solid waste landfills), flue gas desulfurization in fossil-fuel power plants, and effluent from industrial processes.
If hypersaline brines are improperly managed, they can pollute both surface and groundwater resources. But if there were a simple, inexpensive way to desalinate the brines, vast quantities of water would be available for all kinds of uses, from agriculture to industrial applications, and possibly even for human consumption.
A Columbia Engineering team led by Ngai Yin Yip, assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering, reports today that they have developed a radically different desalination approach—“temperature swing solvent extraction (TSSE)”—for hypersaline brines. The study, published online in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, demonstrates that TSSE can desalinate very high-salinity brines, up to seven times the concentration of seawater. This is a good deal more than reverse osmosis, the gold-standard for seawater desalination, and can handle approximately twice the seawater salt concentrations.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:31AM (2 children)
Extract water, sort the rest, no? You can drink water and get your electrolytes too.
Can you actually re-use the amine solution? Is there a point where the Amine solution becomes too saturated with something where it can't be used or needs to be fixed up?
Either way, that's cool stuff and like all good inventions, seems simple enough.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:48AM (1 child)
“temperature/thermal swing solvent extraction (TSSE)” works with "solvents" which have a high variation with the temperature of the solubility level for the target solutes.
Previously used for e.g. extracting heavy/radioactive metal ions [tandfonline.com] - works by complexing the ion metals in an organic "solvent", on a path like:
- add complexant
- bring the temperature where the compexant absorbs the ions
- separate the complex from the original solvent
- bring the temperature to a value where the complexant evicts the ions
- reuse complexant
I imagine a similar cycle happens here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:42PM
I couldn't download the paper form the url. Some cookie non-sense.
I got it from Sci-Hub instead:
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/18811248.2007.9711396 [sci-hub.tw]
ed2k://|file|takeshita2007.pdf|965470|E3EAEE626508F0F3D80B462A6D6DCE91|h=3BP7FPQ2GMPJQKJIAQVUC6BVVGQHIRP3|/