12 ms·
Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
- grenoire 5y agoIt seems that for both desalination and sanitation (as discussed in the article) of water is now an energy issue. What are some other basic problems (food, water, temperature management, etc.) we're facing that are primarily energy-bottlenecked?
- shados 5y agoTime to find a way to move crypto to proof of desalination.
- Ieghaehia9 5y agoBe careful what you wish for: once they're done desalinating the oceans, they'll go after people! It'll be like the salt vampires from TOS.
- hazbot 5y agoThis got me thinking about what we could and could not do if we had a magical a energy-unbottlenecker, say an infinite capacity battery with arbitrary power output. These become much cheaper: - Transport: synthesise fuel from CO2 + seawater. Or charge a battery. - Water: electrolysis of seawater. - Food grown anywhere: Light + water + fertiliser can be made from commonly available materials. Soil is a bit trickier, but I think you could bootstrap up with composting. - Global warming: pull CO2 out of the air. - Raw materials (concrete, metals): all cheaper to extract with free energy. - producing medicine Still really hard: - making new treatments - inflation of housing prices - escaping earth's gravity (need bounce per ounce) - world peace - writing books - politics
- pomian 5y agoTransportation. All of those above require it. Up front capital costs.
- jay_kyburz 5y agoI don't think its fair to say they are "energy" issues, or that they are bottlenecked by a lack of energy. When building the desalination plant, we can build a solar farm right next door. The problems are political. Nobody is willing to go out and spend the money. My hope is that when automation starts taking peoples jobs, governments will employ and train people to build these big infrastructure projects. Desalination, Green Energy, Reforestation, better Agriculture and Land Management.
- cpottamus 5y agoPer vaclav smil -- Energy is the only universal currency. Everything is energy-bottlenecked.
- rocqua 5y agoI feel that, once you have reduced the consumables of something to energy, that doesn't tend to make it energy limited. Instead, it becomes capital limited. You need to be able to pay for the upfront capital costs of installing the thing. Add to that the fact that, once these developments have happened, they tend to improve a lot, quickly. That means anything you build will, soon, be outdated and stop producing as much yield. Hence, you don't want to invest too much.
- xfour 5y agoWaiting for the inevitable explanation of why this is fatally flawed and won’t work at scale?
- felixfurtak 5y agoI guess electrolysis of hydrogen from water isn't really a very efficient process so would therefore need a lot of energy. It's the same reason that we're not all driving around in hydrogen powered cars.
- throwaway316943 5y agoHence the catalyst
- IncRnd 5y agoMade out of expensive Palladium
- throwaway316943 5y agoAlso used in every catalytic converter in every car.
- tristor 5y agoWow, that’s incredible. Since it uses electricity for it’s energy input, this could be readily adapted for use in remote areas powered by solar plus battery. Even in Western nations this is a boon to treat well water sources instead of shock chlorination. This combined with GAC filtration can produce very clean water anywhere you can get sunlight.
- riknos314 5y agoThe amount of electricity required wasn't mentioned, so while I'm hopeful that you're right I'm worried that the energy requirements will be prohibitive to adoption in many areas.
- jimmaswell 5y agoThis is reminding me of the water purification device in Fallout 3.
- wanderingmind 5y agoIt needs gold and platinum catalyst. The trouble would be there would be no catalyst in the plant to process water, the day after it is deployed in a remote area.
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- Algol 5y ago*palladium Though I guess that is also a precious metal.
- wanderingmind 5y agoCatalysts are made from inert metals which are all expensive.
- slownews45 5y agoAnytime you read things like 100,000,000 times more effective - you should be asking, what was the numerator or denominator in this. Or are they just describing some tiny part of the system. For example, normally you need to filter, do settling for sediment etc - how did they solve all this? Given the orders of magnitude involved here a 5 MGD plant could produce 500 trillion gallons per day of "commercial approach" water cleaning. The water handling issues alone in doing 500 trillion GPD seem large. Am I missing something?
- icegreentea2 5y agoThe specific measure appears to be in CFU/mL of E. Coli in their test sample before and after. As you suspected, this does not include filtering or settling, just clearing out bacterial contamination. I haven't read the paper yet (paywall)- just looked at their supplementary data. The increased effectiveness appears (guessing here a bit) to be in terms of bacteria load reduction given similar concentration of bacteriacidal agents in same volume of liquid.
- slownews45 5y agoThe thing is, commercial methods can already do 4 or 5 log reduction on E Coli. I'm not even sure that is necessary usually. I'd focus on other benefits - ie, removal of other compounds etc.
- icegreentea2 5y agoRight, I don't think these they were really gunning for developed commercial systems for this. Their pitch would be this would be more useful for situations where we might not want to be tied to a chemical supply line. Thanks to fellow poster, I have now started reading the paper. The last sentence of their intro reads: > This approach offers the potential for in situ water purification that could, we propose, be suitable for decentralized applications.
- beerandt 5y ago
- pitched 5y agoI just hope the Reactive Oxygen Species that are 10M times more lethal to bacteria aren’t equally more lethal to humans. Also, if this requires electrolysis-level power, it might still not be worth it in most cases.
- kleton 5y agoChlorine is produced with alkaline electrolysis
- gundmc 5y agoHow much gold and palladium are required? Those are massively expensive catalysts and it feels borderline disingenuous to talk about how this will bring clean drinking water to the masses without so much as mentioning cost.
- TheDudeMan 5y ago"But your majesty, the people don't have any gold for their water catalysts." "Let them use palladium."
- osrec 5y agoGiven that they are catalysts, they're not being depleted in the cleaning process. Thus, they're a fixed one time cost, albeit a potentially high one.
- gentleman11 5y ago> The catalyst-based method was shown to be 10,000,000 times more potent at killing the bacteria than an equivalent amount of the industrial hydrogen peroxide Even if it required a fair bit, 10M is a really big number. Long term savings would be huge since the catalysts aren’t consumed in the reactions
- kapp_in_life 5y agoIs hydrogen peroxide "good enough" such that it doesn't matter? Like saying I'm 10 million times less likely to drown watering a lawn than I am washing a car isn't important, because the odds of either happening is vanishingly small.
- pitaj 5y agoThe point is that you can use 1/10,000,000 the H2O2 than you would otherwise for the same amount of sanitation.
- cratermoon 5y ago
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- Someone1234 5y agoThis sounds very cool. Though I wish this article addressed some of the questions I had around commercialization, namely the cost of the gold + palladium, the expected lifecycle, and the expected maintenance routine (e.g. do they have to be regularly removed and cleaned?). The article makes great arguments for why this should work (i.e. hydrogen peroxide is already being used, this just short-circuits how we get a known effective cleaning agent, reducing/removing logistics inefficiencies). So a lot of the question is: Is this cheaper/less hassle than buying stabilized hydrogen peroxide commercially? A lot of these fantastic advances often end up in the black hole, wherein they work as advertised, but the financials/logistics never line up and therefore nobody uses them in anger.
- IncRnd 5y ago> So a lot of the question is: Is this cheaper/less hassle than buying stabilized hydrogen peroxide commercially? From the article: "The team showed that as the catalyst brought the hydrogen and oxygen together to form hydrogen peroxide, it simultaneously produced a number of highly reactive compounds, known as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which the team demonstrated were responsible for the antibacterial and antiviral effect, and not the hydrogen peroxide itself."
- mackatsol 5y agoThe article was very vague… I’ll wait for the paper to come out!
- perihelions 5y agoThe other commenter found it https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352882305_A_residue-free_approach_to_water_disinfection_using_catalytic_in_situ_generation_of_reactive_oxygen_species https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352882305_A_residue...
- mackatsol 5y agoThank you ;-)
- mkr-hn 5y agoLink to the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352882305_A_residue-free_approach_to_water_disinfection_using_catalytic_in_situ_generation_of_reactive_oxygen_species https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352882305_A_residue...
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- rmah 5y agoYeah, the use of "millions of times better" just doesn't pass the sniff test. Given that current commercial methods kill 90%+ bacteria in water, thus, nothing can be even 2x better...and makes me suspicious of any claim in the article. Hopefully it can help people in areas that are currently without clean water, but I'm not holding my breath.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago(CFU/mL of E. Coli with stored H2O2) / (CFU/mL of E. Coli with catalysts) = 10M With that in mind "millions of times better" isn't necessarily a disingenuous description. Though you might say it's somewhat misleading, since as the denominator goes to zero, the fraction goes to infinity :) It's the equivalent of saying 99.99999999% uptime is "ten million times more available" than 99.9% uptime - um, just give me the number of nines please!
- mathstuf 5y agoIf you're measuring in (1-n) terms, you can be 2x better. 95% is 2x as good as 90% and 99.9% is 100x better. Not at all clear at first glance or sure that it's what they're doing here, but just something to keep in mind.
- mabbo 5y ago> Given that current commercial methods kill 90%+ bacteria in water, thus, nothing can be even 2x better That depends how you look at it. Is it 90% killed, or is it 10% survived? If it's 10% survived, then 100m times better is a system where 10/100m % survived instead.
- gus_massa 5y agoHere the 10^8 improvement means that if the commercial method kills 99% of the bacteria, this method kills 99.99999999% of them.
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- jhloa2 5y agoA tangentially related development recently has been peroxide generators to put inside buildings to generate enough hydrogen peroxide to sterilize the air/surfaces without being a health hazard. I've recently had a local school district request that we analyze these devices as an option for COVID mitigation: https://synexis.com/science/reports-data/ https://synexis.com/science/reports-data/
- ArkanExplorer 5y agoOne of the biggest pollutants now in water are PFAS, microplastics, and other hormone disruptors. How to we get rid of those without needing to rely on expensive multi-stage filters that need to be replaced every 4 months?
- pstuart 5y agoDean Kamen teased us with such a solution, but still waiting for lower cost/available units to become available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_(water_vapor_distillation_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_(water_vapor_distill...
- kumarski 5y agohttps://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/644018 https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/644018
- _0ffh 5y agoNice, but it seems the method is not exactly new. Here's a short nature article from the 2nd of March 2016 talking about the same research programme on catalysts at Cardiff University. https://www.nature.com/articles/531011b https://www.nature.com/articles/531011b
- sp332 5y agoWhat's new is the discovery that it's not the H2O2 that's doing the disinfection.
- graycat 5y agoWOW, is this thread treading on thin ice in July? Uh, it is apparently well established that public commentary, e.g., in the mainstream media (MSM), 100% must NOT include chemical formulas or meaningful uses of ratios, proportions, percentages, or scientific, chemical, or microbiological terminology, yet post after post in this thread are in flagrant violation! As I recall, ratios and proportions are from somewhere above the third grade and some of the rest of the topics go up even to, horrors, high school science courses! To add to the transgressions, this thread is discussing the content of a peer-reviewed paper of original research about some tricky, detailed parts of chemistry and microbiology. Intelligent discussion and content? Horrors!! Stand aside as 99 44/100% of media comes tumbling down like that condo recently did in Florida? Maybe! Ah, that's Hacker News for you; no chance of seeing such content, such flagrant transgressions, in the MSM! Uh, I'm not complaining, you understand! Not complaining at all!
- cratermoon 5y ago> works by using a catalyst made from gold and palladium Yeah, those are just found lying around wherever people need clean water.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoHeadline is misleading. "Cleaning" is much different from "disinfecting", sometimes the opposite.
- poorjohnmacafee 5y ago[edit: commenter is right, the paper abstract rendered as "107" not "10^7" in browser, will leave followup question] Since it's a challenge to separate the products/byproducts in catalytic reactions that are homogenous/liquid phases, how would this setup achieve separation post reaction exactly? Anyone know?
- shkkmo 5y agoI think you are missing the exponent in 10^7
- leot 5y agoCould this be used instead of chlorine in swimming pools?
- jcranmer 5y agoOh dear. After reading the notes in the study itself about the scale this was done at, scaling up might be an issue: > A typical H₂O₂ synthesis reaction was carried out using 120 mg of 1% AuPd/TiO₂ [...] The reactor system was then pressurized, typically to 10 bar. The reactor was then cooled by a water bath to 2 °C. When the reactor had reached the required pressure and the flow through the system had stabilized, the solvent (H²O, HPLC grade), typically at a flow of 0.2 ml min¯¹, was introduced into the system. Oh hey, 0.2 mL/min of water. In Virginia, the lowest flow cutoff for waterworks is 0.5 MGD (or 5000 people), the border between Class 3 and Class 4. That flow rate is 6.5 million times that done in the tests here. The large water treatment plant I worked at is another 400 times that, and there are plants that would be another 5 or 6 times that. So the necessary scaling factor is going to be measured in the billions. So what about those reagants? This uses about 0.6 mg of gold to process 0.2 mL/min of water (if I'm reading the notation of 1% AuPd/TiO₂ correctly). Scale that to our small plant, and that's about $225,000 of gold and $350,000 of palladium. Go to the scale I worked at, and that's $190 million of catalyst in terms of raw metal worth alone. That's comparable to the cost of a regular treatment plant of that scale--just on the catalyst. This assumes that there's a neat linear scaling, which I doubt is going to be the case (square-cube law!).
- wolverine876 5y agoThanks for the insights, though let's remember that research is just a first step. This isn't a product being announced for the market. If we looked at the original research behind a lot of mature technology, we'd find the state of the technology to be similarly far from from production. Now others can try to reproduce it, refine it, find other methods of producing the same reactive oxygen species, find substitutes that are more effective or cheaper, etc. It doesn't have to be panacea either. Maybe it will fill a niche. It could save some lives.
- 55555 5y ago> This isn't a product being announced for the market. The press release makes bold implications tbh
- foysaluix 5y agoyeah, we will take the catalysts that get donated and buy our way out of the third world! "heres a solution for limitless free energy! step one, launch a bunch of solar reflectors into space to reflect solar energy at concentrated points on the surface of the earth. Step 2, wait, you don't have a scalable and advanced aerospace industry capable of launching thousands of collectors into orbit? I guess this won't work for you."
- ausumm 5y agohttps://ausum.io/s/6cUMkzR2T_0U-9LX6fQL-dcZoj06aEzQY13WQZiL31Q https://ausum.io/s/6cUMkzR2T_0U-9LX6fQL-dcZoj06aEzQY13WQZiL3... - summarized this article into an audio clip: 1 minute and 43 seconds. Listen or download the audio file.
- elif 5y agowouldn't 1,000,000x improvement in bacteria killing be actually lethal to gut flora?
- rightbyte 5y agoI mean, just spit in the water if that is a problem.
- gorgoiler 5y agoImagine some kind of Ice9 scenario but instead with a catalytic everlasting ultra-disinfectant released into the water cycle. Could it be stopped? Do we live with it? Does everything die and the world enters a new age of archae supremacy? What if it didn’t evaporate so it was oceans only — is the plot about mankind living without fish suppers or is there more to it? The oceans effectively become poisonous to humans too of course. Any city with brackish tidal rivers becomes affected. Does the disinfectant work immediately — do salmon carry it up river? Salmon ladders get blown up by desperate citizens who inadvertently destroy the dams to which the ladders are attached etc. I like hard scifi plots. I am not suggesting this is an actual risk. Time to re-read some classics.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoVaporware that can't make vapor. It's just invisiware. Edit / PSA: These type of sensationalized, "miracle" invention articles attract idiotic questions and uninteresting discussions. Please stop posting this kind of rubbish because it brings down the quality of the site.
- gus_massa 5y agoI agree that it's very overhyped. If I had a magical button to change the upvotes, I'd put it in the 50-100 range. It's an interesting research result, but my guess is that it's much more difficult to apply in production than what the PR pretends. https://xkcd.com/1217/ https://xkcd.com/1217/ But instead of complaining it's much better to upvote the technical comments that explain the problems. For example, the one about the flow rate that is very small. (I was not so worry about the cost of the catalyzers, but after seeing the flow rate, the cost of catalyzer/liter/year looks high.) There are other about what an 10^8 improvement means, and I'd like to see one about how useful is 10^8 if any small hole downstream or bad handling will introduce many more bacteria. (It's like a sunscreen with a FPS of 10^8. It's nice, you can stay for eons under the sun, but forgetting it once per year will reduce the effective number to 10^4.)
- mprovost 5y agoI used to have a camping water purifier from MSR that they developed with a company called MIOX. It ran on batteries and had a little catalyst and you put salt solution in and it fizzed and produced chlorine that you poured into your water bottles. It smelled like a pool. As long as you had batteries and salt you could make an infinite amount of chlorine. It looks like MIOX is still around [0], they make portable units for the military and for temporary installation but I imagine this approach isn't cost effective for a permanent facility. [0] https://www.miox.com/ https://www.miox.com/
- sschueller 5y agoFunny, there was a report on Swiss TV[1] just yesterday where they were talking about how concentrating water cleaning systems is more effective. The went from 11 to 2 large water cleaning facilities in the Kanton of Uri as it is a lot easier to keep those using the latest standard than to maintain 11 separate facilities. They now pump the dirty water at hight pressure to the 2 facilities because of the large altitude drop the the pressure needs to be reduced so electricity is also generated from the waste water. The pipeline last around 70 years while a cleaning facility needs an overhaul every 25 years. [1] https://www.srf.ch/play/tv/sendung/schweiz-aktuell?id=cb28dd84-f0c8-4024-8f20-1a29f5a4ceb7 https://www.srf.ch/play/tv/sendung/schweiz-aktuell?id=cb28dd...
- elihu 5y ago> The team showed that as the catalyst brought the hydrogen and oxygen together to form hydrogen peroxide, it simultaneously produced a number of highly reactive compounds, known as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which the team demonstrated were responsible for the antibacterial and antiviral effect, and not the hydrogen peroxide itself. Interesting. I hope those aren't harmful to humans (or plants, or other animals). Also, from the high reactivity I suppose they might not stick around very long, which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending. It might be useful to be able to treat a large amount of water without leaving any long-lasting impurities, but on the other hand you might have to treat the water again if you want to store it any length of time... On the other hand, if a reactive thing doesn't have anything to react with, maybe it does persist for a long while?
- globular-toast 5y agoConsidering that catalytic converters are routinely stolen from cars in car parks in places like the UK, I wouldn't feel confident installing expensive catalysts in the places where this would be needed.
- RocketSyntax 5y ago"catalyst made from gold and palladium"