A WA Professor has made the finals in the Australian Museum Eureka Prize 2011 for his continuous research into optimising desalination.
UWA’s Biomedical Biomolecular and Chemical Sciences Associate Professor Ben Corry has been developing new membrane technology used in reverse osmosis (RO)—the most widely used method of desalination.
Traditional RO technology requires water to be forced through membranes at high pressure but Prof Corry’s research aims to reduce pressure and consequently reduce energy costs.
“The basic idea was to try and make a membrane that still locks out salts but provides less resistance to water so you can get a greater flow of water under a given pressure,” Prof Corry says.
Researchers have been assembling carbon nanotubes and embedding them into a supporting matrix to form the membrane.
“A traditional membrane is made up of polymers, so long chainlike molecules that are woven together…but the path the water has to travel through is not a straight line—it has to find little gaps through the polymer,” Prof Corry says.
“The new style of membrane we’re looking at has continuous pores, so direct straight line channels from one side of the pore to the other,” he says.
The new membrane’s continuous channel allows water through much easier than a traditional membrane’s interwoven polymer matrix.
Prof Corry’s computational studies and collaborative research have proven that this style of membrane can produce a rapid flow of water.
However recent research has been focused on improving salt rejection that is necessary for effective desalination.
“The challenge is trying to still get [salt] rejection while reducing the pressure required,” Prof Corry says.
“On a laboratory scale we struggle to get the high level of salt rejection that’s required and hopefully the computational studies we’ve been doing will help to show why that’s the case and what needs to be done to combat it.
“We’ve also been looking at ways to make the salt rejection more effective through things like adding chemical functionalisation to the nanotubes to try and improve the salt rejection aspect.”
Improving salt rejection and finding ways to reduce the cost of producing the small textured membrane on a large scale currently prohibit this technology from becoming commercially viable.
Prof Corry says he’s excited and honoured to be recognised for his work which spans over 5 years in desalination and membrane technology and 12 years in human biology.
