New MOF technology will help turn sea water into drinking water and get cheap lithium
More than two billion people on the planet experience a constant shortage of clean drinking water, millions are seriously ill and die due to pollution of water sources and unsanitary conditions.
The planet’s population is growing and, if measures are not taken, the problem of lack of clean water will only worsen. A way out of this situation is offered by scientists from the United States and Australia, who have developed a revolutionary solution that will help turn the salt water of the seas and oceans into drinking water with benefits for the economy and modern technologies.
The organometallic structures created by them (Metal-Organic Frameworks, MOF) are a porous coordination polymer with an internal frame area that has no analogue in nature. In fact, it is a sponge that can be used to collect, store and release chemicals, in particular salt, dissolved in seawater.
The selective permeability of MOFs allows them to be used as filters that capture specific atoms and molecules. Currently, reverse osmosis plants are used for desalination of sea water; they are ineffective and expensive – to pump water through the membrane, it is necessary to inject high pressure, a large volume of water is wasted, and during cleaning, along with pollution, useful minerals are washed out of the water.
Organometallic structures purify water using a minimum of energy, since they do not require high water pressure to retain impurities – they trap certain molecules in free flowing water.
Besides desalination, MOFs have potential in other modern areas such as electronic devices and electric vehicles. They could radically change the technology for extracting lithium – one of the most valuable chemical elements in the era of batteries and batteries.
Today, lithium is mined in mines and extracted from concentrated brine, a very expensive technology. MOF installations in the seas will make it possible to extract lithium by accumulating a valuable element in the cells of polymer “sponges”. Installed in the wastewater of enterprises, such sponges will simultaneously neutralize liquid waste and extract valuable chemical elements from them, which can be used in other areas of production.
“The global demand for lithium for electronics and batteries is very high. These membranes enable a very efficient way of extracting lithium ions from seawater — easily, cheaply, and on an industrial scale, ”says Huangting Wang, one of the co-authors of the study.
The scientific work of scientists was published in the journal Science Ad
vances Source: ecotechnica.com.ua