

Battery Desalinates Seawater - pwg
http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/02/Battery-Desalinates-Seawater.html

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bwarp
It's not a battery - it's a cell and it doesn't generate power. It takes
power.

It only gets about 50% out.

I did this in chemistry at school about 25 years ago.

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Panoramix
Paper title: "Batteries for Efficient Energy Extraction from a Water Salinity
Difference"

Why comment if you didn't read the article? is this "humor"?

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Retric
You can gain energy by mixing fresh water and salt water, or you can use
energy to extract salt from sea water, but you can't gain energy extracting
salt from sea water.

Edit: _“The desalination battery is essentially the same device, but
reversed,” explains La Mantia, who worked again with Cui and other
researchers, on the new study.

The desalinated water that comes from the battery still contains too much salt
for drinking, La Mantia says: “We removed up to 50% of the original salt, but
we need to arrive at 98%.”_

PS: Reverse osmosis uses more energy the saltier the water is so depending on
how much energy this process uses it could be useful as a first stage prior to
reverse osmosis filtering even if it can only remove 50% of the salt.

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Tycho
If they meet their goal of making this 98% effective at removing salt, what
would be the economic impact of this technology?

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anamax
> If they meet their goal of making this 98% effective at removing salt, what
> would be the economic impact of this technology?

Its economic impact will depends on its costs.

This is merely yet another way to use energy to produce "less salty water".
There are lots of such schemes.

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rsanchez1
Well, I guess when you remove 50% of the salt, it technically desalinates
water. This is nothing to get excited about until it turns seawater into
drinking water both cheaply and at a large scale.

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Panoramix
The exciting part is that it generates electricity while desalinating water.
That's a nice combo.

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Dylan16807
No, there's a different device that produces power and this is its inverse.
The article is not worded very clearly.

