Abstract
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations have reported that 0.35billion people are currently suffering from water shortage. Over one-third of world’s population lives in water-stressed countries and it will be rose two-thirds in 2025. This paper proposes to manipulate the thickness of the electro-double-layer (EDL) inside the anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) nanochannels as virtual filter to select uni-ions for desalination through electrical static charges. Due to the electric static sieving effect at larger channel diameter (~100 nm), the power consumption is much less than those by tradition methods, such as reverse-osmosis (RO) and electrodialysis (ED) which need to function in much smaller nano pores or channels of 1 nm. This design has been demonstrated that the concentration of the salt water can be reduced about 55%, which is closed 50% in theory. By pumping flow system to increase flow rate, the desalination rate is about 30%. According to the result, the EDL overlapping could repulse ions passing through nanochannels. Finally, we want to develop another desalinated and portable device.