We cannot imagine safe and healthy drinking water without filters, and these filters keep heavy metals and bacteria at bay. However, it would be difficult to realize these filters without carbon. After all, carbon is a critical part of the filter industry. Amazingly, carbon hasn’t stopped serving this industry yet. This element is full of potential, and one of its potential applications is graphene filters. Let’s learn a bit about the progress made with graphene water filters.
What Is Graphene And How It Can Help:
Graphene is a one-cell thick carbon layer, and graphene filters are made by stacking graphene layers atop each other. This structure makes graphene filters a simple mechanical filter with micropores that can stop several contaminants.
Graphene filters are simple in design and can perform effective filtering independently, even without any other chemicals or materials. Using other chemicals and materials along with graphene makes the filter apt for more specific applications.
In addition to simplicity and effectiveness, graphene filters don’t foul. This means it doesn’t go bad or get soiled after several filtering sessions. Fouling is a common problem with many other filters, so you need to replace them. However, for graphene, you can reuse them on a stretch without worrying about them fouling.
These amazing properties make graphene a great filter material. However, there is still time before they hit the market, but the research going on is promising. Let us share with you two such research and their interesting outcomes.
Reorienting Nanochannels:
After stacking graphene layers on top of each other, we obtain a horizontal nanochannel. This is not desirable in filtering because water now has to travel a long way before reaching the other side of the filter. To overcome this, we need vertical nanochannels. However, there was no way of creating our desired orientation to our dismay. Nonetheless, it changed in 2021 when a research paper discussed a novel way to do that.
We begin by stacking a graphene sheet on a layer of an elastic substrate held under tension. After that, the tension is increased, and the graphene sheets start to wrinkle. This wrinkling of sheets rearranges the nanochannels. After wrinkling the sheets severely, vertical nanochannels were obtained.
Desalinating Water:
We all know the importance of freshwater, and with so much water around us, there is only a little we can drink. Therefore, we look for ways to desalinate seawater and drink it. Graphene can even help us with this; according to the research of 2021, scientists were able to desalinate saltwater using a graphene oxide layer stacked on a porous membrane surface. It was feasible for them to control the size of nanochannels and the charge induced on the surface. Thus, we can try to develop graphene-based technology that can help us desalinate water cheaply and in an energy-efficient way.
Conclusion:
Researchers have made progress with graphene filters reducing the filtering time and also using it to filter out seawater. However, there is still time before graphene filters hit the market. Until then, shop for the best available filters only at Clean Liquid Systems. You can call us at
713-253-0100 for more inquiries