Efficient Approach to Water Desalination

The availability of fresh water is dwindling in many parts of the world. One promising source of potable water is the world's virtually limitless supply of seawater, but desalination technology has been too expensive for widespread use. MIT researchers Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and graduate student David Cohen-Tanugi have come up with a new approach using a different kind of filtration material - sheets of graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the element carbon, which they say can be far more efficient and possibly less expensive than existing desalination systems.