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Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
21–30 of 141 posts
Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#22This 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 kn…
> 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."
Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#23Anytime 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" w…
The 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 bacteri…
The 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.
Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#24[deleted]
Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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.
Hence the catalyst
Made out of expensive Palladium
Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#26Yeah, 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.
(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!
Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#27Link to the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352882305_A_residue...
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Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#28It 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?
Time to find a way to move crypto to proof of desalination.
Be 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.
Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#29Yeah, 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.
If 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.
Re: Instant water cleaning method ‘millions of times’ better: study
#30It 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?
This 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