Solving a natural riddle of water filtration
Image: The University of Texas at Austin/Cockrell School of Engineering.
For many engineers and scientists, nature is the world’s greatest muse. They seek to better understand natural processes that have evolved over millions of years, mimic them in ways that can benefit society and sometimes even improve on them.
An international, interdisciplinary team of researchers that includes engineers from The University of Austin has found a way to replicate a natural process that moves water between cells, with a goal of improving how we filter out salt and other elements and molecules to create clean water while consuming less energy.
In a new paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology, researchers created a molecule-sized water transport channel that can carry water between cells while excluding protons and undesired molecules. These channels mimic the water transport functions of proteins in our bodies known as aquaporins. In our cells, uncontrolled transport of protons alongside water can be harmful because they can change the pH of cells, potentially disrupting or killing them.
This is the first instance of an artificial nanometer-sized channel that can truly emulate the key water transport features of these biological water channels. And it could improve the ability of membranes to efficiently filter out unwanted molecules and elements, while speeding up water transport, making it cheaper to create a clean supply.
“It copies nature, but it does so by breaking the rules nature has established,” said Manish Kumar, an assistant professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. “These channels facilitate speedy transport of molecules you want, like water, and block those you don’t want, like salt.”
The research team’s artificial water channels can perform the same functions as aquaporins, which are crucial at a larger level for desalination, water purification and other processes for separating molecules. And they do so while transporting water 2.5 times faster compared to aquaporins.
The artificial channels are three nanometers in width by three nanometers in length. If densely packed into the correct size membrane, the channels can pass roughly 80 kilograms of water per second per square meter of membrane, while rejecting salts and protons at rates much higher than current commercial desalination membranes are capable of.
“These artificial channels in essence solve the critical technical challenges of only allowing water molecules to pass while excluding other solutes like salt and protons,” said professor Huaqiang Zeng of Department of Chemistry at Hainan University and the Institute of Advanced Synthesis at Northwestern Polytechnical University in China.
“Their extraordinary water transportation speed and the fact that these channels allow for simpler membrane fabrication suggest they will become a crucial component of next-generation membranes for producing clean water to address severe scarcity facing human beings in this century.”
Aquaporin-based channels are so small that they only allow a single molecule of water through at a time, like a single-lane road. A unique structural feature in these new channels is a series of folds in the channels that create additional “lanes,” so to speak, allowing water molecules to be transported faster.
“You’re going from a country road to a highway in terms of water transport speed, while still keeping out other things by putting little bumps in the road,” said Aleksei Aksimentiev, a professor of biological physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who collaborated on the research.
Kumar took a class taught by Aksimentiev on the physics of nanomachines while studying for his Ph.D. in environmental engineering at the University of Illinois. The course, he said, was about as challenging as it comes, and he still refers back to his notes from the class years later.
They worked together on a paper when Kumar was a student. And then when he became a professor, Aksimentiev helped him with simulation work on another paper. For years now, they have been collaborating on the study of water transport channels.
The interdisciplinary team features faculty and researchers from around the world in physics, chemical engineering, pharmacology and more. Researchers come from UT Austin, University of Illinois, Harvard Medical School, Hainan University and Northwestern Polytechnical University in China and NanoBio Lab in Singapore.
Zeng is the corresponding author on the paper. Kumar led the testing portion of the project and Aksimentiev led the simulation work.
Earlier this year, Kumar teamed with Penn State University researchers on a discovery that shed new light on how traditional water desalination membranes work. They found that uniformity throughout the membrane speeds up transporting water and improves the process of filtering out salt.
This new work, Kumar says, takes that concept to another level. These channels can only be one size to fit the desired water molecules through while squeezing out other unwanted molecules.
Going forward, the team plans to use these artificial water channels to fabricate next-generation reverse-osmosis membranes to convert seawater to drinkable water.
See more here: phys.org
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Jerry Krause
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Hi James McGinn,
Are these U of Texas Austin scientists using your unique ideas about your understanding of water???
Have a good day, Jerry
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James McGinn
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Hi Jerry,
Thanks for this question.
Jerry: “Are these U of Texas Austin scientists using your unique ideas about your understanding of water?”
James: No, I don’t think so. My insight mostly has to do with the behavior of water in the atmosphere. This is reverse osmosis, a process that was known well before I got involved in water. Reverse osmosis is an energy intensive process because it involves breaking the bonds that form between water molecules and the atoms of salt molecules, reversing the natural tendency of water to dissolve salt.
Can the efficiency of this process be improved by getting more uniformity in the size of the orifice, as they are claiming here? This I don’t know. But it is important to realize that some of it is just an artifact of the fact that it is a process that requires energy to reverse the process that dissolves salt.
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Brian James
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Jun 9, 2017 How To Build A Rainwater Collection System
Having a way to harvest rain can be critical if the grid were to fail. In this video we’ll cover from start to finish how to setup your own rain catchment system.
https://youtu.be/corcY2AITGs
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers,
When people step outside of their scholarly world I have to ask: Do they do a literature search to find out what has already been learned??? Relative to this article the answer seems to be: NO!!!
Read the following from Wikipedia. “In the normal osmosis process, the solvent naturally moves from an area of low solute concentration (high water potential), through a membrane, to an area of high solute concentration (low water potential). The driving force for the movement of the solvent is the reduction in the Gibbs free energy of the system when the difference in solvent concentration on either side of a membrane is reduced, generating osmotic pressure due to the solvent moving into the more concentrated solution. Applying an external pressure to reverse the natural flow of pure solvent, thus, is reverse osmosis. The process is similar to other membrane technology applications.
“Reverse osmosis differs from filtration in that the mechanism of fluid flow is by osmosis across a membrane. The predominant removal mechanism in membrane filtration is straining, or size exclusion, where the pores are 0.01 micrometers or larger, so the process can theoretically achieve perfect efficiency regardless of parameters such as the solution’s pressure and concentration. Reverse osmosis instead involves solvent diffusion across a membrane that is either nonporous or uses nanofiltration with pores 0.001 micrometers in size. The predominant removal mechanism is from differences in solubility or diffusivity, and the process is dependent on pressure, solute concentration, and other conditions.[2]. Reverse osmosis is most commonly known for its use in drinking water purification from seawater, removing the salt and other effluent materials from the water molecules.[3].
^ Crittenden, John; Trussell, Rhodes; Hand, David; Howe, Kerry and Tchobanoglous, George (2005). Water Treatment Principles and Design, 2nd ed. John Wiley and Sons. New Jersey. ISBN 0-471-11018-3
^ Panagopoulos, Argyris; Haralambous, Katherine-Joanne; Loizidou, Maria (2019-11-25). “Desalination brine disposal methods and treatment technologies – A review”. Science of the Total Environment. 693: 133545. Bibcode:2019ScTEn.693m3545P. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.07.351. ISSN 0048-9697. PMID 31374511. “
I ask you Readers: Am I missing something here relative to this article? Which I consider documents the ‘scholarly’ nonsense that seems to be occurring at such an esteemed university as the University of Texas, Austin??? And then published in in ‘Nature Nanotechnology’.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Herb Rose
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This process is described in Dr. Gerald Pollack’s book “The Fourth Phase of Water” where a polar surface will cause water to exclude particles and salt ions from the water near the surface and concentrate the contaminates in the interior of the container.The surfaces will also cause water to flow through small tubes with no force being applied. The water molecules near a polar surface gain a negative charge so a potential difference exist between the water near the surface to the interior of the container which causes it to store energy like a battery.
Water is a liquid crystal created when it absorbs IR energy and water molecules split into hydroxyl ions (which form the crystal) and hydronium ions in the interior of the crystal. This give the nano water droplets a negative charge which increases as more IR energy is absorbed, causing them to rise in the atmosphere until they reach their second melt point and convert to a liquid..
I would recommend reading the book if you are interested in discovering why water has such peculiar properties.
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James McGinn
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Hi Herb:
Herb:
. . . where a polar surface . . .
James:
I’ve heard of a polar molecule, ie H2O. But to refer to a surface as polar seem unconcise. Is this surface polar because it contains H2O, a polar molecule? If so, isn’t this redundant? You know, is there any such thing as a surface of water being non-polar? And even if it is polar what is the magnitude of the polarity? Is there a concise understanding or not. Pollack doesn’t have answers to these questions and so, in my opinion, he is just contributing to the confusion by pretending he’s found something that he can’t define and refuse to think about in a rigorous manner.
Herb:
Water is a liquid crystal . . .
James:
Possibly, but so what? How does this explain anything that isn’t already known/obvious?
James McGinn / Genius
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Herb RosE
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Hi James,
A polar surface is made from crystals (like glass) or other substances where there is an uneven distribution of charges Non polar liquids, like most solvents are not affected by the differences in charges but water with its polarity will orient itself to these charges.
You have said that the reason water rises in the atmosphere is because of an electric charge. If the charge was fixed the water droplet would quickly rise to an altitude where this repelling force was equal to gravity’s downward pull. If water is a liquid crystal as energy is added and the crystal grows the negative charge would also increase and it would continue to rise in the atmosphere. The water would slowly rise until it reached its second melt point. What is your explanation for how water rises in the atmosphere despite the lessening density of the atmosphere around it?
Herb
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Mark Tapley
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Hello Herb:
A little off subject from the fourth phase of water but a while back during our discussion of the alleged Apollo moon landing I mentioned that I also did not believe in the effectiveness of atomic weapons. I stated that I believed that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just conventional explosives with napalm but would look into it further.
Since then I have read the book by Akio Nakatani “Death Object, Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax.” Looks like it is just another one of your establishment shibboleths Herb. Akio says that explosive fission needed cannot be generated. That is why no one has used them since the fake atomic attacks on Japan. He also covers some of the fake tests.
Akio goes into a lot of detail but I will just mention a couple of items. Only one of Hiiroshima’s twenty bridges was knocked out. The Koi Train station which was 2.29 Km from the epicenter of the “atomic blast” was running trains to Nagasaki over railway trestles that were unscathed within 48 hours. There were lots of utility poles still standing close the the supposed blast center as well as lots of trees that budded out the next year. Everything Jewmerica does is a lie and a fraud. The atomic weapons are just another another example.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Mark,
Where do you find your “experts? I suppose you will assert that the dramatic change of shape of Bikini island was done by ordinary bombs and the failure to repatriate the occupants because of radioactive contamination were an elaborate ruse. Explain to the people of Tahiti that they were not contaminated by the French nuclear test and to all those who witnessed the explosion oh a nuclear bomb in space that it was a gigantic illusion. You will accept no evidence that contradicts your beliefs and accept any evidence that supports your beliefs. The result is that you have no credibility.
Herb
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Mark Tapley
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Hello Herb:
The book I refer to offers lots of evidence including many photos, as does the Miles Mathis site. Not just more MSM propaganda as with the fake moon landings, and the current fake virus. I guess you believe in covid 19 too. Did you get your blood toxin chemo injection yet Herb? Our wonderful government says it’s safe and effective, and their here to help us.
Herb Rose
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Hi Mark,
The Starfish Prime explosion was seen from New Zealand to Hawaii and yet you say all those witnesses were lying.
I believe in personal experiences and have caught diseases like measles and chickenpox from other people.
I went to school with a girl whose father was in the air corp. He was assigned a job of flying a plane through the mushroom cloud from a nuclear test and spent the rest of his life being tested to see why he didn’t die like all the others on the plane. I don’t think he was faking it.
I am by nature skeptical but I do believe in reason and evidence. You, on the other hand, are in constant denial refusing to believe anything or anyone who has a different belief than you no matter what their credentials or experience. If more than two people know a secret it will no longer be a secret yet you reject the testimony of thousands with first hand experience maintaining that are all colluding to deceive you. You will only accept what agrees with your beliefs which makes you delusional.
Herb.
Mark Tapley
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Hello Herb:
All you are providing are antidotal testimonies. The government has to reinforce their fakery as long as they can. Some times this becomes untenable as with the “moon landings” and so they always manage to lose the primary evidence. The Miles Mathis site shows how in. many cases the nuclear tests were faked. Obviously the gov. can seed radiation particles into an explosion as well as simulate “atomic” blasts. Nakatoni provides detailed analysis of the staged nuclear attacks.
You fall back on the old defense of thousand believed such and such. There were thousands of people involved in the Apollo money laundering operation as well as the fake atomic program, (and 911) just as their are many millions that believe in the fake virus for which there is not one shred of evidence. The virus, just like climate change is just more government fakery using campaigns of imaginary and invisible fear. But by controlling the MSM narrative along with key operatives they are leading the herd (like you) to Agenda 2030-21 destruction.
I never said that measles and other conditions were not real. I just stated they were not pathogenic nor transmissible. If you can prove otherwise, microbiologist Stephan Lanka has left 1.5 million Euro’s on the table for you Herb. You obviously believe the government’s official stories so answer the question. Have you lined up for the Rockefeller CDC blood toxin injection. Surely a true believer (like you) in all the wonderful government psyops such as fake Floyd, Los Vegas, the capitol riot and Fauci’s AIDS “epidemic” should be the first in line. And don’t forget you booster Herb.
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J Cuttance
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Excluding protons? I’m hoping this is an unfortunate typo and should say proteins.
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