Miracle material graphene can distil booze, says study
Membranes based on the “miracle material” graphene can be used to distil alcohol, according to a new study in Science journal.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16747208
Amazing enough that this stuff appears to be an effective shield against helium (few materials are), but 10x more amazing that water migrates through the material at almost the same rate of evaporation! I am sure that it will be investigated for concentration/purification uses, though clearly cost will be a very non-trivial issue. However, if they can find a simple, inexpensive way to produce the material in commercial quantities (I got no ideas), then I can see a huge gain in uses for desalination as current forms of desalination are considered very expensive. Presuming there is a way to realize ethanol from cellulose (thereby putting corn back into the food chain), extracting the ethanol from the water is a very energy intensive process and something like this might make the process vastly less expensive (if, naturally, the price of the materials is low enough).
As a by the by, one of the LinkedIn groups I monitor brought up a research paper where the authors engineered e.coli (our gut bacteria genetic engineering workhorse) to not only digest cellulose, but to use the digested cellulose to produce several different compounds that could be used as gasoline, diesel or jet fuel substitutes. (Note that this research is distinct from work mentioned here.) It would seem to me that the era of the biofuels might be upon us in the next decade or so, nicely picking up as peak (fossil) oil declines. I wish I could motivate myself to work in this area, it looks like a gold mine!
