Researchers Suggest Treating Water With Disintegration of Droplets

Tomsk Polytechnic University has come up with a new way of treating wastewater and drinking water by using a method of explosive disintegration of droplets.

This new environmentally friendly method would allow scientists to purify even heavily polluted water and considerably reduce the consumption of energy required for the purification process.

Representative image, Source: Wikimedia Commons, Labeled for Reuse

This water treatment method, developed at Tomsk Polytechnic University, includes several stages. First, contaminated water is converted into emulsions and suspensions. To obtain emulsions, researchers add liquids that are insoluble in water. To obtain suspensions, they add solid substances that are distributed in the form of tiny particles.

Then these emulsions and suspensions are injected into a special heating chamber where each droplet containing impurities is heated to relatively low temperatures (from 300 to 500 ºC).
Upon heating, a decrease in pressure occurs across the boundary between various components of the droplet (between the two components in emulsions, and between the liquid and solid particles in suspensions).

This pressure drop causes an explosive breakup of interphase boundaries. From the initial droplet, an aerosol is formed — a multitude of droplets with some exploding and disintegrating upon the application of heat. These processes follow a chain reaction, thus quickly separate pure water from impurities.

Read full article: Sputnik

Find out more:  Tomsk Polytechnic University

Media

Taxonomy

• Treatment
• Treatment Methods
• Filtration
• Filtration Solutions
• Filtration
• water treatment