One of the most persistent needs of the world is supplying clean drinking water to its population. Today, nearly half of the world population does not have access to clean and fresh water. Ocean water is mostly salted and needs to be purified. This is the main reason for most countries adopting seawater desalination as a solution to provide their population with fresh and pure drinking water.
Seawater desalination though is an effective way to remove salts from ocean water but it cannot be used at large-scale because it’s quite expensive and is also dangerous for living organisms. So, this makes for a need to find out ways to desalinate seawater.
A new way to desalinate water has developed known as shock electrodialysis, and not only removes salt but chemicals and bacteria present in water. Shock electrodialysis is capable of providing with a more efficient water purification system. It uses significantly less energy in comparison to the traditional desalination methods but has a limitation on the rate at which water can pass through the membrane.
To produce clean and fresh drinking water in a single step using the electrodialysis method, place a layer of porous material close to the cathode. This layer will act as a filter and removes everything that cannot pass through the micropores. The size of this layer is 0.5 micrometers so anything larger than that cannot pass through it. However, bacteria is smaller than the porous material layer and can easily pass through it but the experts argue that these also don’t pass through because they get shattered by the powerful electric fields close to the cathode.
The Electrodialysis method allows chlorine and sodium ions to pass through the membrane in the presence of an electric field and leaving purified water from the outlet on the other side. Only the ions pass through the membrane and not the water molecules. Electrodialysis can desalinate seawater at a much higher rate in comparison to the reverse osmosis.
There is also a problem with this method that it removes the salt from seawater but it does not remove contaminants such as bacteria and dirt. Electrodialysis can be used for filtering and disinfect water in a cost-effective way but it’s still not clear whether it can be used on a larger scale or not. So water should be processed through additional stages of filtration to make it usable for drinking and various other purposes.
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Source by Pallavi Sood
