Crowd Computing Helps Nanotechnology Water Filtration

Nanowerk News reported that a study published in Nature Nanotechnology looked at using a novel nanotechnology based strategy to improve water filtration. The project was initiated by IBM’s (NYSE:IBM) World Community Grid, an experiment in crowdsourced computing. It was carried out by over 150,000 volunteers who contributed their own computing power to the research.
As quoted in the publication:

The research project involves the minute vibrations of carbon nanotubes called “phonons,” which greatly enhance the diffusion of water through sanitation filters. The project was the joint effort of a Tsinghua University-Tel Aviv University research team and was led by Prof. Quanshui Zheng of the Tsinghua Center for Nano and Micro Mechanics and Prof. Michael Urbakh of the TAU School of Chemistry, both of the TAU-Tsinghua XIN Center, in collaboration with Prof. Francois Grey of the University of Geneva.
The research team managed to demonstrate how, under the right conditions, such vibrations produce a 300% improvement in the rate of water diffusion by using computers to simulate the flow of water molecules flowing through nanotubes. The results have important implications for desalination processes and energy conservation, e.g. improving the energy efficiency for desalination using reverse osmosis membranes with pores at the nanoscale level, or energy conservation, e.g. membranes with boron nitride nanotubes.

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