Manish Kumar, of the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has led a team of researchers to develop a new method for water filtration. The novel method uses inspiration from the way cells transport water throughout the body. The goal was to mimic aquaporins, membrane proteins that function as water channels. Their findings are published in Nature Nanotechnology.
One major deviation from the team’s method to that of the aquaporin system was the membranes developed by Kumar did not work well independent of each other. By combine several of them to work as a network of water wires, they increased their efficacy dramatically.
"Our method is a thousand times more efficient than current desalination processes in terms of its selectivity and permeability," Kumar said. "For every 10,000 saltwater molecules that pass through current desalination systems, one salt molecule might not be filtered out. With our new membrane technology, one salt molecule for every 10 million water molecules would not be filtered out, while maintaining a water transport rate comparable to or better than current membranes."