Desalination is a process undertaken for the removal of salt from the ocean or wastewater. It is one of the many steps needed to produce drinkable water for the human population or water for agriculture and other industries. The same water is required to be treated for the removal of boron (toxic to plants) and heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic (toxic to humans) either before the salt is removed or after. However, the process, in the end, leaves toxic brine, which is rather hard to dispose of safely without causing any environmental risks.
To tackle this problem, researchers have discovered a simplistic approach for the removal of toxic metals like boron and mercury. The innovative process would be a huge contribution towards the advancement of the Desalination System Market as it has the ability to not only remove toxic materials but also potentially capture valuable ones like gold. Further, the system can be customized to remove particular toxic metals abundant in particular oceans of the world.
The new approach can be added to present the membrane-based electrodialysis desalination process without any complication. It has the ability to successfully eliminate 100 percent of the toxic metals, leaving pure brine water. The system would also isolate all the valuable metals for disposal later in a proper manner.
Generally, all desalination or water treatment systems need a long series of expensive, pre-and post-treatment that the water would be required to go through, one after the other. Instead, the newly developed technique could do all these numerous steps with a single one, making the system much more efficient. More so, it could be implemented within the existing setup, simplifying things further.
In the study, researchers displayed that the polymer membranes are high effective once they are added into the membrane-based electrodialysis systems. In the system, the electric voltage is responsible for driving ions through the membrane successfully removing metals and salts, and diffusion dialysis.
The technology is an amazing feat, especially due to its universal applicability. In accordance with the toxic impurities that need to be eliminated, the system can be customized through the membrane, thus treating the water as required. For instance, if a lead is present in water in large amounts of iron and arsenic, as is known for waters near Bangladesh, they can be targeted with the help of a customized membrane for particular contaminated water sources. Hence, the system is extremely beneficial for the world as it makes things simple, more effective, and can be used by different types of manufacturers present in different parts of the world.