Nanocarbons clean water without the use of chemicals and transform waste heat into electricity
Friday, October 16, 2015 - 07:00
in Physics & Chemistry
When purifying waste water, chemical reactions are used or it is subjected to elaborate filtering methods to remove salts and heavy metals. Now scientists in Saarbrücken are working on a desalination method which does not require the addition of chemicals and which is highly energy-efficient: in the process known as capacitive de-ionization (CDI), electrodes are used to extract the ions from the water and collect them on the electrodes. The result is clean water and ions which have been enriched on the electrodes. This environmentally friendly process can even be used to generate electricity: emissions such as carbon dioxide are also suited to generating electrical energy when they are dissolved in water as ions.