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Yeah, 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.
Here the 10^8 improvement means that if the commercial method kills 99% of the bacteria, this method kills 99.99999999% of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right, 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 sui…
If you have to install chlorinating equipment and operate it, then it becomes a matter of if the marginal savings in chlorine is worth it.
However there's also a good chance that chlorine concentration is controlled by downstream factors more than initial treatment- which is basically the case at every well/spring that produces drinkable water out of the ground, yet still needs residual treatment.
So there might not be any reduction in the required amount of chlorine.
How 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.
How much platinum and palladium catalytic converters in cars [1] consume? There are at least tens of millions of cars with such converters. Catalysts don't get used up, and metals of platinum group are 100% recycleable. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter
Yeah, 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.
Let's say the best effort is 91.001% and our smart new process is 92.001%. Now set the baseline at 91.000% This is the sleight of hand bit: If we say that "normal" is 91.000, we now set the best effort as 0.001 and our effort as 1.001. That can seem quite reasonable when trotted out by a news reader or reporter.
So we are (1.001/0.001) x 100 = 100,100% better than the previous best!
The real improvement is more like: 92.001/91.001 x 100 = 101.098% which is a bit obvious when you look at the numbers involved.
With a single quite clumsy move and a bit of misdirection you can turn 101 into 100,100 and sound quite convincing. Now that's only using the very basic arithmetic operations and a bit of bullshit. The clever kids can really go to town.
We need some sort of laws about the presentation of statistics because it really is getting out of hand. The nonsense I've just presented isn't fiction. I saw something similar recently, can't remember what for but it took a while for me to calm down afterwards 8)
Wow, 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.
Anytime 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…
I don't think this is comparable to a water treatment plant. No sediment settling, biofiltration etc. It's comparable to sterilising water using hydrogen peroxide or boiling it, in a camping context.
Not sure what the "millions of times" measures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Is 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much platinum and palladium catalytic converters in cars [1] consume? There are at least tens of millions of cars with such converters. Catalysts don't get used up, and metals of platinum group are 100% recycleable. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter
In the real world, catalysts do in fact get used up, usually due to fouling from side reactions and that kind of thing. That's why you often need to replace a catalytic converter within the lifetime of a vehicle.
How to we get rid of those without needing to rely on expensive multi-stage filters that need to be replaced every 4 months?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.