Making Seawater Safe to Drink
There are 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water on Earth. Nevertheless, ready access to clean drinking water remains a major issue for millions of people. A much sought-after innovation was developed by a UK-based team of researchers who created a graphene-based sieve capable of removing salt from seawater. The new technology could aid millions around the World.
Blue Dot
The Earth is a watery place.
About 71 % of the Earth’s surface is covered with water.
The oceans hold about 96.5 % of all Earth’s water. Water also exists in the air as water vapour, above ground in rivers, lakes, icecaps and glaciers, and within the ground as soil moisture and in aquifers. Even as part as your body.
Water never sits still. Our planet’s water supply is constantly moving from one place to another and… from one form to another.
Actually, things would get pretty stale without the water cycle.
All the Water in the World
The water you now drink has been around since the Earth was very young.
Around 3.8 billion years ago, the oceans had achieved their present volumes.
The global amount of water on Earth is about 1,386,000,000 km3 (cubic kilometres). That is all the water we are ever going to get. Because, practically speaking, the system is closed: nothing can be added, and nothing can be subtracted.
With 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water on Earth, it may be difficult to grasp why there is a worldwide problem with fresh water supply.
Fresh Water
However, the amount of liquid fresh water is only 10,633,450 km3, including groundwater, swamp water, streams, rivers and lakes. And as much of this water is located deep underground, it is not available to humans.
Additionally, each day, 1,170 km3 (280 mi3) of surface water evaporates into the atmosphere.
If you really want to find freshwater, most of it, 29,200,000 km3 (7,000,000 mi3), is locked into glaciers and icecaps, in the polar regions and Greenland.
Worldwide Water Resources
| Water source | Water Volume (km3) | Global Water (%) | Fresh Water*(%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oceans, Seas, Bays | 1,338,000,000 | 96.54 | -- |
| Ice caps, Glaciers, Permanent Snow | 24,064,000 | 1.74 | 68.7 |
| Groundwater | 23,400,000 | 1.69 | -- |
| - Fresh | 10,530,000 | 0.76 | 30.1 |
| - Saline | 12,870,000 | 0.93 | -- |
| Soil Moisture | 16,500 | 0.001 | 0.05 |
| Ground ice, Permafrost | 300,000 | 0.022 | 0.86 |
| Lakes | 176,400 | 0.013 | -- |
| - Fresh | 91,000 | 0.007 | 0.26 |
| - Saline | 85,400 | 0.006 | -- |
| Atmosphere | 12,900 | 0.001 | 0.04 |
| Swamp water | 11,470 | 0.0008 | 0.03 |
| Rivers | 2,120 | 0,0002 | 0.006 |
| Biological water | 1,120 | 0.0001 | 0.003 |
Source: Igor Shiklomanov’s chapter “World fresh water resources” in Peter H. Gleick (editor), 1993, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources (Oxford University Press, New York).
Most of the water people and life on Earth requires everyday comes from surface-water sources. This amount of water would only be enough to fill a sphere about 93,113 km3 (22,339 mi3), with a diameter of about 56.2 kilometres (or 34.9 miles), which overall would look smaller than the surface of Lake Michigan, although it would be much deeper.
Not an awful lot.
The problem is salt.
And we need salt to live, but only in minute quantities.
Salt can Kill
Sea Water
Sea water contains way more salt than we can safely metabolise – about 70 times more. A typical litre of seawater will contain about 2.5 teaspoons of salt (the kind we sprinkle on food, that is sodium hydro-chloride), but much larger amounts of other elements, compounds and other dissolved solids, collectively known as salts.
The proportions of these salts and minerals in our living tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water.
Essentially, we sweat and cry seawater.
Although curiously we cannot tolerate these salts and minerals as an input.
Dehydration
Take a lot of salt into your body and your metabolism will very quickly go into crisis.
From every cell, water molecules rush off to try to dilute the sudden intake and carry off the excess salt. This leaves cells dangerously short of the water they need to carry out their normal functions: they become dehydrated.
In extreme cases, dehydration will lead to seizures, unconsciousness and brain damage.
Meanwhile, the overworked blood cells carry the salt to the kidneys, which eventually become overwhelmed and shut down. Without functioning kidneys, you die.
Which is why we don’t drink sea water.
Most of the water people and life on Earth requires everyday comes from surface-water sources.
This amount of water would only be enough to fill a sphere about 93,113 km3 (22,339 mi3), with a diameter of about 56.2 kilometres (or 34.9 miles), which overall would look smaller than the surface of Lake Michigan, although it would be much deeper.
Not an awful lot.
A Graphene-Based Sieve to Remove Salt from Sea Water
A UK-based team of researchers has created a graphene-based sieve capable of removing salt from seawater.
Reporting their results in Nature Nanotechnology, the scientists from the University of Manchester, led by Dr Rahul Nair, show how they solved some of the challenges by using a chemical derivative called graphene oxide.
The difficulty has been to produce large quantities of single-layer graphene using existing methods, such as chemical vapour deposition (CVD). Currently, the production routes are quite costly.
To make a one-atom thick graphene permeable, you need to drill small holes in the membrane.
However, if the hole size is larger than one nanometre, the salts will pass through that hole. And the graphene membrane needs also to be have a very uniform less-than-one-nanometre hole size to make it useful for desalination.
All in all, this is a real technological challenge.
Making the Most of Graphene
Graphene comprises a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Its unusual properties, such as extraordinary tensile strength and electrical conductivity, have earmarked it as one of the most promising materials for future applications.
First isolated and characterised by a University of Manchester-led team in 2004, graphene is a potential “wonder material”.
Graphene Oxide
In terms of scalability and material cost, graphene oxide has a potential advantage over single-layered graphene.
Graphene oxide membranes have already proven their worth in sieving out small nano-particles, organic molecules and even large salts. Until now, they could not be used to filter out common salts, which require even smaller sieves.
Inexpensive Desalination Solution
Previous experiments have demonstrated that graphene oxide membranes became slightly swollen when immersed in water, allowing smaller salts to flow through the pores with the water molecules.
Nair and his team demonstrated that using layers of epoxy resin (commonly used in strong glues) on either side of the membrane was sufficient to stop the expansion.
When common salts are dissolved in water, they form a “shell” of water molecules around the salt molecules, which allows the tiny capillaries of the graphene-oxide membranes to block the salt from flowing through along with the water.
Although water molecules can go through individually, sodium chloride cannot get through the graphene-oxide membrane. It always depends on the help of water molecules. As the size of the shell of water around the salt is larger than the channel size, the sodium chloride cannot get through.
By 2025, the United Nations expect that 14% of the World’s population will encounter water scarcity. This technology has the potential to revolutionise water filtration across the World, in particular in countries which cannot afford large scale desalination plants.
The selective separation of water molecules from ions by physical restriction of interlayer spacing opens the door to the synthesis of inexpensive graphene membranes for desalination.
With graphene-oxide membrane systems, it is anticipated that desalination can be undertaken on a smaller scale to make the technology accessible to countries unable to fund large plants and without compromising the yield of fresh water produced.
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