The headline news in in desal research this week has been from UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

UCLA Engineering’s Eric Hoek holds nanoparticles and a piece of his new RO water desalination membrane. Credit: UCLA Engineering/Don Liebig

Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science today announced they have developed a new reverse osmosis (RO) membrane that promises to reduce the cost of seawater desalination and wastewater reclamation.

Guess what? The way the UCLA engineers have done it has been to charge the membrane so as allow the water to pass through and repel salt and waste. Does this sound like something I’ve been talking for the last couple months? No?

The new membrane, developed by civil and environmental engineering assistant professor Eric Hoek and his research team, uses a uniquely cross-linked matrix of polymers and engineered nanoparticles designed to draw in water ions but repel nearly all contaminants. These new membranes are structured at the nanoscale to create molecular tunnels through which water flows more easily than contaminants.

Unlike the current class of commercial RO membranes, which simply filter water through a dense polymer film, Hoek’s membrane contains specially synthesized nanoparticles dispersed throughout the polymer — known as a nanocomposite material.

“The nanoparticles are designed to attract water and are highly porous, soaking up water like a sponge, while repelling dissolved salts and other impurities,” Hoek said. “The water-loving nanoparticles embedded in our membrane also repel organics and bacteria, which tend to clog up conventional membranes over time.”

Well, the only part of this that I could brag about having advocated –is the part about using charge to filter water through a carbon nanotube. It doesn’t look like the membrane described above quite follows on the work of the LLNL scientists in May and the work of University of Kentucky scientists last November that showed super fast flow through rates for water passing through carbon nanotubes.)

With these improvements, less energy is needed to pump water through the membranes. Because they repel particles that might ordinarily stick to the surface, the new membranes foul more slowly than conventional ones. The result is a water purification process that is just as effective as current methods but more energy efficient and potentially much less expensive. Initial tests suggest the new membranes have up to twice the productivity — or consume 50 percent less energy — reducing the total expense of desalinated water by as much as 25 percent.

Earlier this year, the LLNL researchers said that the flow rates they had achieved with carbon nanotubes caused them to expect that they could reduce desalination costs by 75% by allowing purified water to pass through the membranes at room temperture and pressure. Compare this to the UCLA researchers saying the savings realized by their membrane would be 25%. This sounds like they have reduced–but not eliminated — the need for energy intensive & cost expensive pumping & plunging water against the membrane.

Interestingly the UCLA researchers have already partnered with a company called NanoH2O to produce the membranes. However, they don’t expect to go into production for two years.

Hoek is working with NanoH2O, LLP, an early-stage partnership, to develop his patent-pending nanocomposite membrane technology into a new class of low-energy, fouling-resistant membranes for desalination and water reuse. He anticipates the new membranes will be commercially available within the next year or two.

So how do you get these membranes up to production. As I mentioned earlier this week one answer might be Nantero.

Nantero, Inc., a nanotechnology company using carbon nanotubes for the development of next-generation semiconductor devices, has resolved all of the major obstacles that had been preventing carbon nanotubes from being used in mass production in semiconductor fabs.

Semi conductors are not semi permiable membranes but likely a lot of the procedures for creating the one will map over onto the other.

Another place they might go to find a production procedure would be Northwestern. Northwestern University has developed a method for making carbon nanotubes in commercial quantities while solving a quality control problem.

This might be a place where a venture capitalist like Firelake Capital might bring parties like Nantero and NanoH2O into a working alliance. Or if the work is still too early — then a national lab might contribute funds and coordinate efforts at NanoH2O and, say, Northwestern.

I have two quick notes for researchers before I get to the point of this week’s blog–which will be directed to research administrators.

Note 1: As soon as anyone gets a working carbon nanotube membrane — the next question will be how do you scale production of the membrane to commercial cost/volume. One answer might be Nantero.

Nantero, Inc., a nanotechnology company using carbon nanotubes for the development of next-generation semiconductor devices, has resolved all of the major obstacles that had been preventing carbon nanotubes from being used in mass production in semiconductor fabs.

Semi conductors are not semi permiable membranes but likely a lot of the procedures for creating the one will map over onto the other.

Note 2: If you’ll recall, two weeks ago I mentioned that the body’s cells walls might provide a model for desalination membranes.

Still another way biomedical work might provide a model for desalination is in nanospheres used for drug delivery.
Consider Two Press Releases: one from a team consisting of Sandia National Laboratories, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the University of Georgia in Athens … and the other — a consortium consisting of Argonne National Laboratory, the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute and The University of Chicago Hospitals.

The San Dia group covers platinum nanospheres and the Argonne Group covers biodegradable nanospheres. These are used for drug delivery in the body. The thought did occur to me that the biodegradable nanospheres–ie… bubbles — could be produced cheaply and charged so as to capture salt and settle out of solution — or be magnatized out of solution.

That’s it.

Well one more. Last week I posted about a British Company that used greenhouses for water desalination to produce high value fruits and vegetables. Another thing those green houses could produce is biocrude/biodiesal from algae. Consider a joint project of the DOE San Dia Labs and LiveFuels Inc. They aim to convert algae-to-oil. They could do it in greenhouses in West Texas with fresh water — and mesquite flavored salt as additional byproducts. Yeehaw.
Now to the point of this week’s post.

How does a research administrator evaluate all the research directions available today so as to appropriate money where it will do the most good? Especially when there are so many options and so much breaking news.

As it happens, until recently, water desalination has been in the relative slow lane of technological development. But other industries have been in the fast lane for some time. Its instructive to look at how they’re coping. Basically, managers in frontline industries are pulling the opinions of frontline people by gettting them to wager with play money on what they think the best option is.

It’s called a prediction market, based on the notion that a marketplace is a better organizer of insight and predictor of the future than individuals are. Once confined to research universities, the idea of markets working within companies has started to seep out into some of the nation’s largest corporations. Companies from Microsoft to Eli Lilly and Hewlett-Packard are bringing the market inside, with workers trading futures contracts on such “commodities” as sales, product success and supplier behavior. The concept: a work force contains vast amounts of untapped, useful information that a market can unlock. “Markets are likely to revolutionize corporate forecasting and decision making,” says Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, in Virginia, who has researched and developed markets. “Strategic decisions, such as mergers, product introductions, regional expansions and changing CEOs, could be effectively delegated to people far down the corporate hierarchy, people not selected by or even known to top management.”

This could also work across the federal lab system so as to give an idea as to what strategies looked most likely to succeed at any given moment based on the information flow.

How would it work?

You show up for work, boot up your computer and log onto your company’s Intranet to make a few trades before getting down to work. You see how your stocks did the day before and then execute a few new orders. You think your company should step up production next month, and you trade on that thought. You sell stock for the production of 20,000 units and buy stock that represents an order for 30,000 instead. All around you, as co-workers arrive at their cubicles, they too flick on their computers and trade. Together, you are buyers and sellers of your company’s future. Through your trades, you determine what is going to happen and then decide how your company should respond.

This could be done for research.

Yahoo! Research, the research and development division of Yahoo!, runs a prediction market called the Tech Buzz game (see http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/index.html).

“It’s a play-money market where people try to predict what technologies people will be searching for,” Pennock said, whether it be an internet browser or an MP3 player. The game evaluates both the power of prediction markets to forecast high-tech trends and a Yahoo! Research system for conducting electronic commerce.

Are there hosted solutions out there that could be tailored to desalination R&D? Yep.

Prediction markets also have spawned some startups, including Inklingmarkets.com and NewsFutures.com. “Inklingmarkets offers a hosted solution where it’s easy for any company to create a private prediction market for internal corporate forecasts and decisions,” Pennock said. “Newsfutures provides software and services for companies to run internal markets, and also will host special challenge markets on their website.”

How did all this begin?

HOW IT BEGAN. One of the earliest prediction markets was the Iowa Electronic Markets, founded in 1988 by the University of Iowa, to guess the winners of presidential elections. In the 1990s, a few companies, including Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), began to apply prediction market theories to corporate events.

And the rest is history as mentioned above.

Curious Rami is this weeks fastest growing WordPress Blog. The Blog has some very good advice for development & design teams (as in KISS) and some pretty good jokes.

Something to think about.

Maine was once the center of the US salt industry.

History of Salt Making in Maine

During the American Revolution, including the War of 1812, American shipping was interrupted and was not dependable. As a result, salt which had been shipped from such ports as Cadiz, Spain and Lisbon, Portugal, had become scarce. All along the coast of Maine salt works sprang up. From Wells to Eastport, salt works were busy evaporating the Gulf of Maine for its prized salt to supply the needs of the United States.

The salt works have long closed and are scarcely mentioned in the history books. But there was a time when much of the country seasoned, cooked and preserved with sea salt form Maine.

Today, a salt making operation has opened again in Maine–that makes specialty table salts. Interestingly, the table salt from Maine is made in greenhouses.

Maine Sea Salt is made by evaporating and reducing sea water in solar Green Houses. The Maine Sea Salt Company, based in Bailey Island, produces this sea salt from ocean water of the Gulf of Maine. Maine Sea Salt is made by evaporating and reducing sea water in solar Green Houses. The reduced sea water is moved to another Green house in shallow pools, for further reduction and finished for harvesting.

The Sea Salt is continuously harvested in Green Houses and new sea water added thru the summer and fall months.

Solar Green Houses For Finishing Salt In Shallow Pools

Once they’ve collected the salt, they smoke it with various woods to flavor it. I called them up this week and bought some hickory and apple wood smoke flavored salt.

The reason I find this interesting is that a more high tech version of the same green houses has been developed in recent years by a British Company called Seawater Greenhouse to desalinise water for greenhouse agriculture in desert coastal areas of the world. The green houses answer the following question I’ve heard from time to time: “Even if you could bring fresh water to desert areas — often the the desert soil is ruined by salt intrusion–so what’s the point?”

The Seawater Greenhouse is a unique concept which combines natural processes, simple construction techniques and mathematical computer modelling to provide a low-cost solution to one of the world’s greatest needs – fresh water. The Seawater Greenhouse is a new development that offers sustainable solution to the problem of providing water for agriculture in arid, coastal regions.

There are other areas besides the coasts that could use something like this. There are huge parts of West Texas New Mexico and elsewhere that are undergirded by vast brine aquifers. These aquifers could be pumped and the water sent to these green houses to produce several crops annually of high value fresh fruits & vegetables.

The process uses seawater to cool and humidify the air that ventilates the greenhouse and sunlight to distil fresh water from seawater. This enables the year round cultivation of high value crops that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to grow in hot, arid regions.

So how does this work?

The Seawater Greenhouse uses the sun, the sea and the atmosphere to produce fresh water and cool air. The process recreates the natural hydrological cycle within a controlled environment. The entire front wall of the building is a seawater evaporator. It consists of a honeycomb lattice and faces the prevailing wind. Fans assist and control air movement. Seawater trickles down over the lattice, cooling and humidifying the air passing through into the planting area.

Sunlight is filtered through a specially constructed roof, The roof traps infrared heat, while allowing visible light through to promote photosynthesis. This creates optimum growing conditions – cool and humid with high light intensity.

Sounds good to me. Seawater Greenhouse has been around for about 15 years. They’ve designed and built greenhouses in Tenerife, Abu Dhabi & Oman They seem to have the modeling algorithms to design greenhouses for any and every microclimate and local building material.

 

 

Update:

Consider a joint project of the DOE San Dia Labs and LiveFuels Inc. They aim to convert algae-to-oil. They could do it in greenhouses in West Texas with fresh water — and mesquite flavored salt as additional byproducts.

A great model for a desalination membrane is any of the millions of cells we have in our bodies.

Last month NIH funded researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Arizona modeled Aquaporins — a class of proteins that form membrane channels in cell walls. Aquaporins allow for water movement between a cell and its surroundings. Researchers found that the same protein can be used as a water channel or an ion channel depending on the signaling pathway activated in the cell.

So what?

If you had an ion gate that could ward off charged sodium ions depending on their charge then you might be able to put one of these gates on a semipermiable membrane and do some serious water desalination–just like human cells do!

The modeling work at Illinois and Arizona builds on models used for the study of ion channel gating kinetics at Los Alamos National Laboratory last year.

This week researchers learned a bit more about the shape of the gate:

Researchers decipher the shape of the sodium/potassium ion pump

Channel surfing. Charged oxygen atoms (red) deep inside a sodium/potassium pump are part of a filter that allows only ions with the correct charge to pass from one side of the cell’s membrane to the other.

Two new papers from Rockefeller University professor David Gadsby, head of the Laboratory of Cardiac and Membrane Physiology, go a long way toward describing the shape of the gated channel in the Na/K pump and providing an understanding of how this pump — and others like it — collects ions on one side and releases them on the other.Many of the residues in an ion pump have an electrical charge that works to either draw in or repel approaching ions, allowing only those with the correct charge to flow through to their destination.

As I mentioned this looks a good model for desalination with carbon nanotubes –if the nanotubes were so large they required gating. Manifest Interconductance Rank (MIR) models and models called Aggregated Markov Processes used for ion gating studies at Los Alamos……. might be adapted for water desalination studies.

This month Popular Mechanics magazine awarded GE Research’s advanced Hydrogen Electrolyzer its 2006 ’s Breakthrough Award.

GE’s electrolyzer, which was developed by a research team at Global Research led by Richard Bourgeois, was recognized for its potential to make hydrogen production by water electrolysis economically feasible. The novel design makes extensive use of GE-developed materials and processes. A GE invented plastic, Noryl™, replaces complex and expensive metal parts. Metal coating techniques from GE’s aircraft engine and power generation products are used to make high performance electrodes with very low processing costs.

So what’s the payoff?

The U.S. Department of Energy has identified electrolyzer capital costs as a major barrier to the competitiveness of hydrogen fuel for transportation. GE’s electrolyzer has the potential to bring the cost of producing hydrogen down to a level that is competitive with the current price of gasoline.

Why did Popular Mechanics think GE’s Hydrogen Electrolyzer was so cool?

“GE’s electrolyzer represents a profound breakthrough in hydrogen energy that has the potential to greatly expand the possibilities in realizing cleaner, more affordable energy solutions, said James Meigs, Editor-in-Chief, Popular Mechanics magazine. “We were impressed as much with the technology’s potential impact as we were with the creativity of design that enabled the breakthrough itself. We applaud GE for this extraordinary achievement.”

Notice that Popular Mechanics mentioned how they were impressed not just by the invention itself but the “creativity of design that enabled the breakthrough itself.” Maybe they used some version of that new autocad tool that allows the the designer to specify the function while the software spits out the form. Or maybe they used some version of that MIT tool that aids cost estimates for complex projects.

“The core issue with producing hydrogen from electrolyzers is that the economics are not there. They are too expensive to build, so we set out in our program to attack the capital costs,“ Fletcher added.

Today, producing hydrogen by water electrolysis costs at least $8 per kg including capital, energy, and operating costs. GE participated in a program with the U.S. Department of Energy that has the goal of bringing the cost to under $3. By lowering costs on the capital side, GE researchers are confident this goal can be met.

So how far along is this new machine?

Thus far, GE researchers have built and tested an electrolyzer big enough to make a kilogram of hydrogen per hour. A kilogram of hydrogen has about the same energy content as a gallon of gasoline.

Where would the electricity come from?

Electrolyzers, when coupled with wind, solar or nuclear power, produce hydrogen from water …..

Or if the system becomes sufficiently efficient–you might use the hydrogen to run an electrical generator to produce more hydrogen with enough hydrogen left over to run something like say…a pump.

The article is thinking that the capital costs are so low the hydrogen electrolyzer could be used for fueling stations .

Within the next decade, electrolyzers could serve as the foundation for future hydrogen vehicle refueling stations.

However, I’m thinking the Hydrogen Electrolyzer could be used for water pumps when you want to pump a lot of fresh water 1000 miles inland. (But again costs and efficiencies will have to decline further to produce surplus energy more cheaply. –And that’s a matter of finding cheaper & better catalysts.)

Last week’s post mentioned the work of Pittsburgh R.K. Mellon Professor of Chemistry and Physics John T. Yates Jr. He showed that water in carbon nanotube test tubes formed daisy chains connected by hydrogen and then stacked one upon the other as they went into the test tube nanotube.

This was a great puzzlement to me.

After all what did this have to do with the work of the LLNL scientists in May and the work of University of Kentucky scientists last November that showed super fast flow through rates for water passing through carbon nanotubes. (Certainly it seemed that LLNL & UK nanotubes were too wide to stop the Na & Cl atoms .)

What it looked like was that water actually takes on new properties spontaneously so as to conform appropriately to new space.
So I googled carbon nanotube +water and got one of those gee whiz duh wow moments that make science fun.

Consider this two year old post from the American Institute of Physics.

Nanotube Water

Nanotube water, a one-dimensional form of water consisting of a string of water molecules confined in a carbon nanotube, has been studied with neutron scattering by physicists at Argonne National Lab. Neutron scattering measurements, along with computer simulations of the molecular interactions between the water and the surrounding single-walled carbon nanotube, confirmed that water molecules had successfully been taken up into the nanotubes in the form of a “wire.” But this was not all; surrounding the water wire was another water structure, a sheath of water, a cylindrical square-ice- sheet formation (see figure).

The result of this novel architecture was that fluid-like behavior was observed at temperatures far below the freezing point of normal water. The hydrogen bonds along the water chain seem to be softened, allowing, for example, a freer movement of protons along the chain. The Argonne researchers (contact Alexander Kolesnikov, akolesnikov@anl.gov, 630-252-3555) believe that this anomalous behavior might help to explain other phenomena featuring nm-scale confined water such as water migration from soil to plants via xylem vessels and the proton translocation in transmembrane proteins. (Kolesnikov et al., Physical Review Letters, 16 July 2004.)

Might also explain why water goes up a redwood tree. In any case, compare the picture presented by the American Institute of Physics with the picture presented by LLNL in their May 2006 presentation of their carbon nanotube and water experiments.

American Institute of Physics

Nanotube Water

Proposed structure of nanotube-water, water confined with a single-wall carbon nanotube. The interior “chain” water molecules have been colored yellow to distinguish them from the exterior “shell” water molecules in red.

Reported by: Kolesnikov et al., Physical Review Letters, upcoming.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Scott Dougherty, LLNL

Artist’s rendering of methane molecules flowing through a carbon nanotube less than two nanometers in diameter. (Click here to download a high-resolution image.)

Of course, the LLNL picture shows methane passing through the nanotube and the American Institute of Physics picture shows water passing through the nanotube. But that’s not the point. The point here is that the American Institute of Physics picture may be the more accurate representation of what happened at the LLNL labs. So what? Well, the H20 molecule in Nanotube water has been strung out and shethed in more water. That configuration may be suffiently small & tight to exclude Na & Cl.

There’s been a lot of work in carbon nanotubes of late. The work comes from a broad assortment of labs and pushes the nano boundry along a broad front.

Northwestern University has developed a method for making carbon nanotubes in commercial quantities while solving a quality control problem.

Current methods for synthesizing carbon nanotubes produce mixtures of tubes that differ in their diameter and twist. Variations in electronic properties arise from these structural differences, resulting in carbon nanotubes that are unsuitable for most proposed applications.

Now, a new method developed at Northwestern University for sorting single-walled carbon nanotubes promises to overcome this problem. The method works by exploiting subtle differences in the buoyant densities of carbon nanotubes as a function of their size and electronic behavior. The results will be published online Wednesday, Oct. 4, in the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology (October 2006).

The researchers also maintain that their work can be reproduced on an industrial scale.

“The technique is especially promising for commercial applications,” said Hersam, “because large-scale ultracentrifuges have already been developed and shown to be economically viable in the pharmaceutical industry. We anticipate that this precedent can be straightforwardly translated to the production of monodisperse carbon nanotubes.”

Single-walled carbon nanotubes are coated in soap-like molecules called surfactants, then spun at tens of thousands of rotations per minute in an ultracentrifuge. The resulting density gradient sorts the nanotubes according to diameter, twist and electronic structure. Credit: Zina Deretsky (adapted from Arnold et al.), NSF

………………………

In another interesting advance that solves for the carbon nanotube twisting problem MIT researchers have discovered

that certain molecules can attach themselves to metallic carbon nanotubes without interfering with the nanotubes’ exceptional ability to conduct electricity.

MIT researchers have discovered that certain molecules can attach themselves to metallic carbon nanotubes without interfering with the nanotubes’ exceptional ability to conduct electricity. At left, the high conductance state has two molecular orbitals, shown in green. Some molecules even let the nanotube switch between highly conductive, left, and poorly conductive (right, with one red molecular orbital), creating the potential for new applications. Image courtesy / Marzari Lab

 

The work is reported in the Sept. 15 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Carbon nanotubes — cylindrical carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair — have properties that make them potentially useful in nanotechnology, electronics, optics and reinforcing composite materials. With an internal bonding structure rivaling that of another well-known form of carbon, diamonds, carbon nanotubes are extraordinarily strong and can be highly efficient electrical conductors.

The problem is working with them. There is no reliable way to arrange the tubes into a circuit, partly because growing them can result in a randomly oriented mess resembling a bowl of spaghetti.

Researchers have attached to the side walls of the tiny tubes chemical molecules that work as “handles” that allow the tubes to be assembled and manipulated. But these molecular bonds also change the tubes’ structure and destroy their conductivity.

Now Young-Su Lee, an MIT graduate student in materials science and engineering, and Nicola Marzari, an associate professor in the same department, have identified a class of chemical molecules that preserve the metallic properties of carbon nanotubes and their near-perfect ability to conduct electricity with little resistance.

Using these molecules as handles, Marzari and Lee said, could overcome fabrication problems and lend the nanotubes new properties for a host of potential applications as detectors, sensors or components in novel optoelectronics.

Attaching a molecule to the sidewall of the tube serves a double purpose: It stops nanotubes from sticking so they can be processed and manipulated more easily, and it allows researchers to control and change the tubes’ electronic properties. Still, most such molecules also destroy the tubes’ conductance because they make the tube structurally more similar to a diamond, which is an insulator, rather than to graphite, a semi-metal.

Some molecular handles can even transform between a bond-broken and a bond-intact state, allowing the nanotubes to act like switches that can be turned on or off in the presence of certain substances or with a laser beam. “This direct control of conductance may lead to novel strategies for the manipulation and assembly of nanotubes in metallic interconnects, or to sensing or imaging devices that respond in real-time to optical or chemical stimuli,” Marzari said.

This approach might help appropriately charge carbon nanotube semi permiable membranes as well for desalination purposes.

……………………..

 

Several weeks ago just the most interesting piece of science was done by University of Pittsburgh R.K. Mellon Professor of Chemistry and Physics John T. Yates Jr. I have suggested that the fastest way to get carbon nanotubes to sort out Na and Cl is to dope the nanotubes with impurities that charge the nantubes and therefor variously repel Na or Cl. Professor Yates shows water doing something entirely different.

 

In collaboration with J. Karl Johnson, who is the William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Chemical Engineering at Pitt, Yates has extensively investigated the use of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) as tiny test tubes. SWNTs are cylindrical molecules with a diameter equivalent to about three atoms. The tube walls are made of a single curved sheet of carbon atoms.

 

Yates and Johnson, along with their students and postdoctoral fellows, obtained a striking result for water molecules confined inside SWNTs, as reported in a recent paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The water molecules inside nanotubes bond together into rings made of seven water molecules. Yates and Johnson, who also are researchers in Pitt’s Gertrude E. and John M. Petersen Institute of NanoScience and Engineering, found that these rings stack like donuts along the nanotube. The rings themselves are bound together by a new type of hydrogen bond that is highly strained compared to the hydrogen bonds within each molecular “donut.”

 

The researchers first detected this novel hydrogen bond experimentally by its unusual singular vibrational frequency and later deduced its character by modeling. “The behavior of water as a solvent inside of nanotubes will probably differ strongly from its behavior in ordinary water based on the donut configuration and the new kind of hydrogen bond discovered in this work,” says Yates.

In another development, research showed that reactive molecules confined inside nanotubes are well shielded by the nanotube walls from reacting with active chemical species like atomic hydrogen, one of the most aggressive chemical reactants in the chemist’s toolbox. The work suggests that chemists could keep certain molecules from reacting by storing them inside nanotubes, while molecules outside the tube are free to react. “This could provide a new tool for focusing reactive chemistry in the laboratory to select one molecule and exclude another one, tucked away inside of a nanotube,” Yates says.

Yates’ approach to water and carbon nanotubes is pretty neat imho. Someone from the desalination research community needs to approach professor Yates and make him an offer he can’t refuse.

Navier-Stokes Equation Progress?

Penny Smith, a mathematician at Lehigh University, has posted a paper on the arXiv that purports to solve one of the Clay Foundation Millenium problems, the one about the Navier-Stokes Equation. The paper is here, and Christina Sormani has set up a web-page giving some background and exposition of Smith’s work.

Wikipedia describes Navier-Stokes Equations this way:

They are one of the most useful sets of equations because they describe the physics of a large number of phenomena of academic and economic interest. They are used to model weather, ocean currents, water flow in a pipe, motion of stars inside a galaxy, and flow around an airfoil (wing). They are also used in the design of aircraft and cars, the study of blood flow, the design of power stations, the analysis of the effects of pollution, etc. Coupled with Maxwell’s equations they can be used to model and study magnetohydrodynamics.

When these equations pass peer review they’ll be very helpful in algorithms that model fluids in a pipe or maybe even in a carbon nano tube.

One other thing. The Millenium Prize, worth $1 million is working well to advance scientific research.

 

 

 

 

How do you pull in research which embraces research unknown unknowns for water desalination? Set a prize for a bench mark or a goal. For water desalination it might be a prize for desalinising X amount of salt water of Y salt concentrate for Z cost.

Here’s the way they’re thinking about the matter in Hydrogen Research.

Prize Program Set Up to Push Hydrogen-Based Fuel Research

By Jim Abrams
AP
05/11/06 7:55 AM PT

“Prizes can draw out new ideas from scientists and engineers who may not be willing or able to participate in traditional government research and development programs, while encouraging them, rather than the taxpayer, to assume the risk,” said Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y.

 

Scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs will be able to vie for a grand prize of US$10 million, and smaller prizes reaching millions of dollars, under House-passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel.

Legislation creating the “H-Prize,” modeled after the privately funded Ansari X Prize that resulted last year in the first privately developed manned rocket to reach space twice, passed the House Wednesday on a 416-6 vote. A companion bill is to be introduced in the Senate this week.

 

Triple Play

“This is an opportunity for a triple play,” said bill sponsor Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C., citing benefits to national security from reduced dependence on foreign oil, cleaner air from burning pollution-free hydrogen and new jobs. “If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create.”

“Perhaps the greatest role that the H-Prize may serve is in spurring the imagination of our most valuable resource, our youth,” said co-sponsor Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill.

The measure would award four prizes of up to $1 million every other year for technological advances in hydrogen production, storage, distribution and utilization. One prize of up to $4 million would be awarded every second year for the creation of a working hydrogen vehicle prototype.

The grand prize, to be awarded within the next 10 years, would go for breakthrough technology.

“Prizes can draw out new ideas from scientists and engineers who may not be willing or able to participate in traditional government research and development programs, while encouraging them, rather than the taxpayer, to assume the risk,” said Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y.

Making Progress

Inglis said the Department of Energy would put together a private foundation to set up guidelines and requirements for the prizes. Anyone can participate, as long as the research is performed in the United States and the person, if employed by the government or a national lab, does the research on his own time.

He said the prize would not take away funds from any federal hydrogen programs, including the $1.7 billion hydrogen research program that President Bush first detailed in 2003.

The Energy Department announced earlier this year that it would provide $119 million in funding for research into hydrogen fuel cells, including $100 million over the next four years to projects to improve components of fuel cell systems.

Several automakers have made advances in hydrogen fuel cell technology or dual gas-hydrogen engines, but such vehicles are still very expensive and there’s no viable infrastructure of fueling stations.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/ln4K8kOxCfseEW/Prize-Program-Set-Up-to-Push-Hydrogen-Based-Fuel-Research.x

On September 14 in a blog called The Pipeline I speculated about how to develop a number of the pieces for a 1000 mile long pipeline. I had a lot of fun anyway. But really, how much would such a project cost? Last week I discussed Changing World Technology’s thermal depolymerization process — which today produces diesel fuel profitably from biomass–including city sewage– with fresh clean water as a byproduct. But once again, it would be nice to have a breakout on its costs for any given particular location and feedstock. There are number of power plants up and down the California coast for which a number of different technologies can be used to harvest waste heat and waste carbon dioxide to make fresh water and energy. It would be nice to have a tool that would enable you to easily cost out the variables. All over the west oil men are pulling up brackish water with their oil. How much would it cost to clean up that water for public use per any given location. Once again it would be nice to have a tool that answered that question. Then there’s the big research question: How much would it cost to develop a cheap low maintenance semi permiable membrane that desalinised water at room temperaterature and pressure.

Likely a company like GE has some kind of in house software that they use to predict costs of big projects. But what about everyone else? How do people comfortably bid on big projects. How do government agencies evaluate those bids. MIT News put the problem this way in this article entitled

MIT tool aids cost estimates for complex projects

Michelle Gaseau, Lean Aerospace Initiative
September 19, 2006

Consider the following scenario: A project manager at a major aerospace company is about to bid on the development of a new air fighter for the U.S. Air Force.

The bid must bring the project in on time, on budget and meet all the government’s requirements. If the bid is too low, the project will miss these markers; too high and the company will be seen as wasteful or inefficient and may disqualify itself from the competition.

Now a new, first-of-its-kind systems engineering cost-estimation model developed by an MIT researcher can ensure that the bid is right on target, which means project risk (and costs) can be reduced. The model allows companies and organizations to develop more accurate bid proposals, thereby eliminating excess “cost overrun” padding that is often built into these proposals.

The software takes the guesswork out of bidding on projects and allows government administrators to effectively evaluate those bids.

The Constructive Systems Engineering Cost Model (COSYSMO), now available commercially, helps eliminate the guessing game played by many large corporations in planning and executing large systems in many different industries. It also helps government agencies evaluate proposals from contractors with a more objective approach.

“In the past, a program manager would look at an earlier aircraft program and estimate by analogy, but now we can go beyond that and use parametrics to go beneath the surface to the underlying reasons why a certain aircraft costs what it does to develop,” said Ricardo Valerdi, a researcher at MIT’s Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI) who developed the new model.

This software is good for not only aerospace but also any large diversified project.

Validated with assistance and historical data from seven major aerospace companies, COSYSMO can be adapted to systems engineering programs in many different industries.

“The inputs to the COSYSMO model are generic, they are not domain specific, so it could be used in estimating effort associated with waste management systems or building new highway tunnels in Boston,” said Valerdi.

That means pipelines, — desalination and dual purpose plants would also be appropriate for this software.

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to creating successful systems by focusing on variables including customer needs, system requirements, design synthesis and system validation all while considering the complete problem.

According to the article — this is a very new thing. On this I have my doubts. But cost over runs do seem to be a way of life in the government. And this software does claim to solve this problem.

Others have developed cost-estimation models for computer hardware and software development, but until now no models have been created to estimate the costs associated with systems engineering.

Computer hardware and software cost-estimation tools help companies estimate costs specifically associated with developing and designing computer hardware and software components and platforms. The costs associated with systems engineering are more difficult to estimate because the discipline deals with multiple factors in the big picture such as system design and customer needs.

COSYSMO helps companies estimate “person-months” specifically associated with a systems engineering effort and costs — such as how many people it will take to develop a command and control system in an aircraft and meet all the customer requirements.

According to Valerdi, the failure to adequately plan and fund systems engineering efforts appears to have contributed to a number of cost overruns and schedule slips, especially in the development of complex aerospace systems.

In fact, some of the companies most famous for cost over runs participated in the validation of the new software.

In addition to its availability via commercial channels, the academic version of COSYSMO and its new user’s manual are both available to members of the LAI Consortium. Many of the consortium members, including BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and L-3 Communications, participated in the validation of COSYSMO.

Three corporations now offer COSYSMO commercially: Price Systems, Galorath and Softstar Systems.(my note: Softstar has a free trial vers
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 20, 2006 (download PDF).

It would probably be a very good thing if desal people in each of the DOE, the EPA, the DOD, a couple Federal labs, a California, Texas & Florida water agency, a couple desalination non profits like WaterReUse, American Water Works Association and the Water Environment Federation, an oil driller–as well as GE and a couple smaller desalination companies…picked up a copy of this software, each hired a $90k year staffer to follow around some old water desalination/energy systems engineer goober and adopted his knowledge to the software.

That would be an ugly sight. So it might be best to hire someone for 60k who will go around and teach everyone to use the software. In any case  with enough diverse people working off the same software cross checking each other and building a library of cost-estimation models — the industry would be well positioned to react fluidly to rapid changes in technology and, indeed, the world.

I was in Santa Barbara last week for a business conference. Nice town. Plenty of palm trees and & sail boats. Inland I walked through several groves of eucalyptus trees. I love the smell of eucalyptus trees. There’s a natal memory there that goes to the groves in Golden Gate Park up in San Francisco.

Santa Barbara is a prosperous town. The conference I attended was at Fess Parker’s Double Tree Hotel. League sanctioned frisbee teams played in the green field across the street. A sign by the field said “Reused water. Don’t drink.” –Or something to that effect. I didn’t check — but likely they were using cleaned up sewage water — to water the grass.

There’s a much better way to handle sewage now days. Its called thermal depolymerization. The process turns raw sewage and darn near anything that’s carbon based–into diesel fuel. The company with the most experience with this procedure is Changing World Technologies. They have a demo plant in Philadelphia which turns sewage into oil and a profitable plant in Missouri that processes turkey offals into oil.
I’ve been following this company since 2003 when Discover Magazine first wrote them up. Discover Magazine returned this year in their April 2006 edition with an update on the company which showed they had pulled the bugs out of their technology and made it profitable. According to this April press release:

Changing World Technologies’ waste-to-oil subsidiary, Renewable Environmental Solutions, shipped more than 250,000 gallons (6000 barrels) of renewable diesel fuel in April 2006, representing approximately 30% of the plant’s capacity. The plant is expected to achieve full capacity in the near future.

The technology is touted for its ability to turn waste into oil for a profit — so that –say–a municipal sewage plant could be turned into a profit center rather than a cost center.

There’s a kicker. What’s left over from this procedure is clean pure water.

The technology received Federal Tax Credits of $1@gallon or equal to those of ethanol. But the technology only receives state tax credits from California, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It would be helpful if the rest of the states came on board.

There is no town in the southwest of the USA that should be without one of these plants to convert their raw sewage into oil and fresh water.

On the flight back from Santa Barbara I picked up a copy of this month’s Discover Magazine which featured an interview with Newt Gingrich. He makes the same points that I made in Computer Power in 5-10 years, The Golden Age of Math, and Nanotechnology’s Future. That is, not only is technology advancing quickly now. The pace of advancement is accelerating significantly.

Discover Magazine Interview with Newt Gingrich
Oct 2006
subscriber only

Q: You have predicted a fourfold to sevenfold increase in scientific discovery in the next 25 years. What does that mean?

Gingrich: I began thinking of the fact that you have more scientists alive now than in all of previous human history. You have better instrumentation and computation. The scientists are connected by email and cell phone. And they are connected by lisencing to venture capital and royalties — and to China and India as reserve centers of production. Put all that together and it leads to dramatically more science than we have ever seen before. And if you get a breakthrough in quantum computing then you’re in a totally different world. My instinct as a historian is that four is probably right. I used that figure when I spoke to the National Academy of Sciences working group in computation and information, and afterwards the head of the group said to me, “That’s too small a number.” He said its got to be at least seven. What it means is that if you have a planning committee looking out to 2031, and you’re going to have four times as much change, that puts you in position of someone in 1880 trying to imagine 2006. If you are going to have a seven times as much change, that puts you in 1660. And nobody understands that.

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