Insights into the flux of water in a water desalination through nanopores process

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simplified model and analytical approach to understand water flux in nanopore desalination, addressing scale challenges and revealing key features of the process.

Contribution

It presents a new simplified model and analytical calculations to study water flux in nanopore desalination, bridging nano-scale simulations and macro-scale applications.

Findings

Analytical model explains water flux behavior in nanopores.

Simplified approach reveals important features overlooked by complex models.

Model helps estimate desalination efficiency at larger scales.

Abstract

Water desalination through nanopores has been shown to be a promising alternative to the currently water purification processes. In spite the results in this direction obtained by means of computational simulations were animating there are still pending issues to be resolved. For example, water desalination involves macro numbers (in size and time) but in such a scale it is literally impossible to attack this problem using all-atoms simulations. It is common to extrapolate results from nano to macro sizes in order to estimate quantities of interest, which must be taken with care. Here we present a simple model which mimics the separation of salt from water, which may help to attack bigger problems on water desalination subjects. Besides, we show that the investigation of a restrict space of parameters imposed by expensive models may hidden interesting, important features involved in the water desalination problem. Finally, we present an analytical calculation which explains the rich behaviour of the water flux through nanopores in a water-salt separation scenario.