Carbon Nanotube Membrane Elements for Energy Efficient and Low Cost Reverse Osmosis

NanOasis Technologies has received $2 million in DOE funding in the ARPA-E program to develop "Carbon nanotubes for reverse osmosis membranes that require less energy and have many times higher flux. Could dramatically reduce the cost and energy required for desalination to supply fresh water for our crops and communities." Water supplies in most of the world are threatened and finding supplies of fresh clean water is a critical worldwide need.

They are one of several companies pioneering the use of carbon nanotubes in reverse osmosis membranes. They claim their technology "substantially lowers energy use, size and capital requirements for desalination, and other water purification and fluid separations applications." The technology is based on work by Dr. Jason Holt, co-founder of NanOasis, following his work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

NanOasis membranes consist of a thin, dense polymer film having carbon nanotube pores (or holes) atop a highly porous support. The super smooth inside of the nanotubes allow liquids and gases to rapidly flow through, while the tiny pore size can block larger molecules. By filtering out larger molecules it automagically purifies water.

Membranes that have carbon nanotubes as pores could be used in desalination and demineralization. Salt removal from water, commonly performed through reverse osmosis, uses less permeable membranes, requires large amounts of pressure and is quite expensive. However, these more permeable nanotube membranes could reduce the energy costs of desalination by up to 75 percent compared to conventional membranes used in reverse osmosis.

One of the main problems with reverse osmosis desalination tech to date has been that the basic process of pumping water and forcing it through a membrane to separate out the salt is highly energy-intensive, making for a high cost. The energy (electricity primarily) is used to pump water at high pressure through membranes. That electricity accounts for perhaps 44 percent of the cost of reverse osmosis desalination. The LLNL announcement of Dr. Holt's earlier work claims "these more permeable nanotube membranes could reduce the energy costs of desalination by up to 75 percent compared to conventional membranes used in reverse osmosis."

NanOasis Technologies

Nanotube membranes offer possibility of cheaper desalination

Cheap Drinking Water from the Ocean

Beyond Salt: Desalination Startup NanOasis Eyes Wider World of Clean Water

References: 

Review: Flow: For Love of Water (2007)

What to do with my old Haier HDT18PA countertop dishwasher? e-waste concerns

I've had this HDT18PA dishwasher for a few years. The space crunch in a small cottage in downtown mountain view caused me to get this compact dishwasher. It fits with the idea of living in a house no bigger than one needs, to use appliances that are no bigger than one needs. The reasoning goes that if we can get our life accomplished with smaller scale housing and other gizmos smaller scale house, that it would make a positive environmental impact by reducing the negative impact of our life.

However this phase of the saga of my HDT18PA is illustrative of some problems with modern gizmos. Namely - gizmos one might buy in an effort to save energy, live with less impact, etc, can negate the hoped for savings by breaking earlier than desired.

The HDT18PA dishwasher worked well for seven years or so. It provided nearly flawless service, the only quibble I have with it is its small size means it doesn't work well for large items like the big frying pan or with large pots. Those however are easily washed in the sink anyway. There are several models of Portable Dishwashers (on amazon.com) on the market, I just happened to have bought this one.

While browsing (recently) the portable dishwasher pages on amazon.com I noticed several customers grumbled that theirs leaked like crazy. This was true for several brands and models. This is what happened with my HDT18PA - after 7 years, that is.

I noticed, hey, the floor is wet. Noticed, hey, there's a bunch of water coming out the bottom of the dishwasher. Hey, why isn't it making huge sparks and electrocuting itself to have all that water pouring out? Yeah, that's the amazing part of this episode is the amount of water pouring out of the dishwasher without any electrical malfunction.

My first step was to take it apart to see if it could be fixed. In retrospect that was a long waste of time but it does illustrate a desirable thing to do. Why aren't more appliances fixable by regular people? And why isn't it more commonplace to repair gizmos rather than just throw them away to get a new one? I'll talk further below about the repair attempts.

This particular gizmo was purchased to aid my quest to be greener than average. But here I am only 7 years later having replaced it (the upright HDT18PA above is the new one) and looking at how to properly dispose of it. Ideally appliances like dishwashers will last essentially forever and 7 years is a short lifetime.

One unfortunate aspect is that the parts for HDT18PA's are unavailable. I searched through several parts catalogs online. There is an amazing set of appliance parts stores online some of whom have parts diagrams to help you know you're picking the correct part etc. Unfortunately parts for the HDT18PA have been discontinued. The repair would have been very easy to fix (as can be seen below) if the replacement part were buyable. Unfortunately the part wasn't available.

I found a used HDT18PA on eBay (the new one pictured above) and had an idea to strip the old one of any useful parts. But that raised the question of how to dispose of the carcass of the old HDT18PA.

My local area includes Palo Alto and Mountain View, both of which have enough green conscious people that there are excellent e-waste recycling programs. Here's a bit that I found while searching:-

Green Citizen is a commercial e-waste recycling business with several locations in the area. They have services for recycling "electronics" but don't make it clear whether they include "appliances" in the category of "electronics". If they were to accept my old dishwasher it would have cost me $0.50 per pound which would have been a $20 or so fee. BTW the Green Citizen website has some excellent resources about e-waste etc.

eRecycle.org is a general information site about e-waste. The information is extensive and excellent. They have a search thingymajig to help you find a recycling facility, but the categories you search for does not include appliances like this. The categories include several kinds of computers, TV or computer displays, PDA's, etc. This is why I asked above whether the definition of "electronics" includes appliances of this sort.

Recycle Works is a program of San Mateo County. It has a bunch of information about programs and whatnot. It includes a search widget to aid finding a recycling program, and their search thingymajig includes a category for small appliances. The search results include not just safe disposal locations but places to donate the gizmo so others can directly reuse it.

The City of Palo Alto Recycling Center is excellent and does take a variety of things like appliances. I've emailed them a query about accepting my dishwasher and they've not responded yet.

Mountain View's e-Waste program is also excellent. As that is where I live, I called them up for information. Turns out as a Mtn View resident I can, three times a year, schedule for disposal of large items. They'll take it somewhere for safe disposal. This is the choice I've taken. Just put it on the curb next to the trash and they send around a special truck for pickup.

I asked on twitter what to do and got back a couple responses. One was if it still has life in it (this doesn't) that Freecycle is an excellent way to hand the object off to someone else. Other ideas like this is the places Green Citizen recommended like Goodwill or other charity organizations. Another place would be the "Free" section of Craigslist.

Repair attempts

Can't find a picture of the malfunctioning part, but here's a picture of one of the repair attempts.

This plastic objects performs a tube-like function. It's made of two pieces of plastic fused together and it forms a channel that carries water from a pipe that comes up the back of the dishwasher, sending that water to the top sprayer. It's a pretty ingenious way to make the dishwasher more compact but it unfortunately can break easily. In this case the two halves split a little, allowing water to leak out in massive quantities.

The amazing part is again, the water leaking from this top tube was pouring over some of the wiring and not causing any electrical mishaps. That to me says some good things about Haier's design.

What I tried was several ways of gluing this together. The hope was to get this part sealed up so it wouldn't leak, put the dishwasher back together, and get another seven years use out of it. No joy even after trying several kinds of glue which promised they were extra strong, or would weld plastic together, or were for plumbing use.

This is the gap which had to be filled. The black tube on the left comes up the back of the dishwasher, and the plastic thingymajig connects from the black tube to that hole in the middle. One idea I had was to simply block the tube and not use the upper sprayer at all. However after having watched this dishwasher in action several times, it's amazing how much pressure builds in the upper tube. The reason all the repair attempts failed was because of the high pressure. Most would work for awhile then spring a leak somewhere. The zip ties in the earlier picture were an attempt to hold it together with all that pressure. Nothing worked.

The new one in place being happily used. But given that I know parts for this have been discontinued, I'll be surprised if this one lasts very long. Fortunately I already know what to do with it once it dies and is unrepairable.

Walk Score gets to expand due to funding from the Rockefeller Foundation

Big news for the WalkScore people. They've received funding from the Rockafeller foundation, plan to make enhancements to the Walk Score system, and are starting an open source software project based on the walkscore software. This is all excellent news.

The enhancements include adding public transit, transportation cost, and greenhouse gas emission data to Walk Score. Or as they say in pressreleasese:

As part of the grant, the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) will provide Front Seat (the developers behind WalkScore) with the estimated transportation costs of a location as well as the household greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. “As people look for a place to live, we want to make it easy for them to factor transportation impacts into their buying decisions,” said Matt Lerner, CTO of Front Seat.

If this pans out they promise the result will be that WalkScore displays include

• You’ll see public transit stops on the Walk Score map
• Public transit accessibility will be factored into your Walk Score
• You’ll see your predicted transportation cost and greenhouse gas emissions provided by The Center for Neighborhood Technology

The open source software project side of this will be hosted at http://walkscore.org (note .org rather than the .com which hosts the commercial service). At the moment the content of that site is a signup form and a promise of more to come. Having been through the open sourcing of a pile of commercial software I can attest that this is not a simple process. One must evaluate every bit of the software to determine whether you have rights to place it under an open source license among other considerations. Further it represents a change in business model. Until now Front Seat, the developers of Walk Score, have been earning their income through providing Walk Score services to real estate agencies. But by putting their source code in the hands of the public it's possible someone else could develop the same service and threaten their income stream. It will be interesting to see how this plays out for them.

The WalkScore is a measure of how walkable a neighborhood is. They have developed a set of measures with which to gauge how attractive it is to walk around a given neighborhood. These are based on the number of "attractions" in a given neighborhood and the presence of walkways to those attractions. More information is on their website at http://walkscore.com

About Front Seat and Walk Score

Walk Score is a project of Front Seat (www.frontseat.org), a civic software company based in Seattle. Since its launch in July 2007, Walk Score has become the most popular worldwide measure of walkability. Over 700 real estate websites show Walk Score on their listings and over 2.5 million scores are distributed to partners each day. The Walk Score team is advised by a tenperson Advisory Board, which includes urban planning, environmental and technical experts.

Links: 

Press Release

Links: 

Front Seat Awarded Rockefeller Grant

References: 

Walkability and walkable cities

A look at Greenroad Media

"Greenroad Media is the only media company that brings together businesses and governments to beautify our highways and public spaces through innovative corporate sponsorships. The result is a truly unique public-private partnership." That's what they have to say about themselves. Their corporate activity is to lease roadside space and plant flowers. That's very nice of them to prettify the roadsides. However the floral displays have corporate messaging in them.

This is done with the approval of state Department of Transportation (DOT) agencies. And clearly it is similar in purpose to existing roadside signs that are infesting the landscape. A difference is that existing roadside signs are on private property, paying money to the landowners fortunate enough to be roadside, while Greenroad Media pays money to the state. What's common is that both act to further encroach corporate messaging into the world around us.

They call it the Living Pixel System ™ and is a way of planting images using flowers of specific coloration. They situate the floral displays on natural slopes along the road, and accompany them with a small roadside sign. The roadside sign is called a "recognition sign" and lists the corporate sponsorship.

It sounds all well and good.. surely planting flowers is a good thing, eh? Well, yes, but...

There's always that 'but' intruding in my mind on what might otherwise be a good idea. I like the idea of planting flowers along the road, to be sure. But. Uh, the objection is the intrusion of corporatism.

Corporatism is in this case propagating itself with advertising. That the advertising is clothed in "green" (flowers) only hides the fact that it's advertising. Am I pleased to hear that more plants are being planted? Yes! Still the purpose is to spread corporatism.

Another objection is that it is placing the states in the position of being fed by the corporation. A larger issue in this is whether the state (governments) should be subservient to corporations or the other way around. My concern in our modern times is that the corporations are more powerful than governments, that corporations are dictating terms to governments, and this puts governments into the position of being unable to represent the will of the people and instead governments are having to kowtow to the will of corporations.

Still, flowers, hmmm...

Links: 

http://www.greenroadmedia.com/

Review: Flow: For Love of Water (2007)

An astonishingly wide-ranging film. An informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests. The story is about water supply, and it covers the global scale of this problem. A little-covered problem all around the world is the delivery of fresh clean water to everybody, the overtaxing of existing water systems, etc. Water is a core human need e.g. we die within two days if we do not have water, and there are many diseases that can be carried in water.

The movie builds a case against the growing privatization of the world's dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel. Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question 'CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?'

One of the transformations covered in this movie is the privatization and commercialism of the water system. All around the world local water systems are being bought up by transnational corporations like Vivendi and Nestle, who then find ways to do corporate profiteering on the back of the core human need for water. For example they're demanding the poorest of the poor pay a few cents for each jug of water, money they can't afford to spend. And in many cases as they cannot afford the commercial water they go down to the local river to get water, but the local river is polluted, full of sewage or industrial waste, they get sick and die.

Around the world there are protests against this system and the protesters are portrayed as believing themselves to be in a life or death struggle. For example a village in India is shown where a Coca-Cola plant was in operation across the street, they described their water as "tasting bad" ever since the plant opened, and they conducted a daily protest for two years against the plant. Eventually the plant was forced to be shut down.

Those are the kinds of things the movie shows. On the flip side from those problems a value is repeated over and over - our cultural tradition is that water, like air, cannot be owned.

For example a case in Michigan has Nestle operating a bottling plant where they are pumping ground water from dozens of wells in the area. Over 400,000 gallons per day of water pumped and bottled for sale. As a land owner they have a right, so the movie says, to use the water from their land. But clearly the "right of use" doctrine wasn't conceived to be conducted at such a large scale. The protesters in that case explain "right of use" as not conveying ownership.

The movie has a huge flaw in the form of an unstated corollary problem. Population growth.

Population growth is a large factor in driving the increase in water use. In 1900 the world human population was around 1 billion people, today it's around 6-7 billion people and rapidly growing.

Obviously whatever water purification and delivery system existed in 1900 has to have become overtaxed by the population growth. Of course more water systems have been built in the intervening years. My point is that to accommodate population growth the water purification and delivery systems have to increase in scale to match.

Most of the movie is living with rural farming communities. People who have mechanical pumps and are accustomed to carrying a jug to a river or well to fetch water. With 6.5x the number of people plus all the industrial increases since 1900 obviously the amount of toxics in the water will have increased since 1900. A local community who could adequately get water from their local well in 1900 needs something else today to accommodate increased population and increased need to purify the toxic stuff out of the water.

The movie says nothing about these problems. This makes the movie very interesting, and full of stunning visuals, but very deeply flawed.

Review: The Power Of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

This movie is very popular among the Transition movement as it is essentially a blueprint for the Transition message. Transition wants us to recognize the twin dangers of Peak Oil and Climate Change, and take steps to increase resilience in our society. The message of the movie is that Cuba already went through this transformation. While their crisis came due to artificially imposed conditions, they did suddenly have to undergo a drastic powerdown and reshaping of their society.

The context is the Cold War struggles between the U.S. and the Soviet Union played out in a small country off the coast of Florida. Cuba was the Soviet Union's main presence on the doorstep of America, and when the Soviet Union collapsed they could no longer afford to continue funding Cuba, and they pulled out. Cuba had adopted the "Green Revolution" system of agriculture with petrochemical based fertilizers and fossil oil fueled tractors and high energy use, just like other modern countries. But when the Soviet Union left so did their access to fossil fuel. The U.S. imposed sanction after sanction in an effort to squeeze the Cuban government in a modern sort of siege warfare. This simply made Cuba's situation more dire. There were food shortages and most people lost 20 lbs or more during the period.

I suppose the powers that be expected Cuba to collapse and beg for mercy. What happened instead was a reinvention of their society, and the development of localized resources especially for food. There was a mass adoption of Permaculture and Organic agriculture, of urban farming, and much more.

The movie makes Cuba out to be an agrarian paradise and a miracle. It describes Cuba as an object lesson from which the rest of the world could learn important lessons.

Of course the powers that be in the U.S. doesn't want Cuba to be portrayed as anything but a poor land held in the grasp of an insane dictator ..blah blah blah blah.. There are travel restrictions, economic restrictions, and more which keep Americans from easily traveling to Cuba and seeing how they really live.

AASIN: 

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

Principles: 

Minimizing resources required to achieve desired results of our activities

References: 

Rob Hopkins' Transition Handbook

Review: The End of Suburbia

The End of Suburbia is a documentary concerning itself with predicting the effects of the coming peak of oil production. It consists of interviews with leading peak oil educators including Richard Heinberg, Colin Campbell, Michael Rupert, and James Howard Kunstler. The movie paints a very dark story, and calls on America to relocalize into walkable urban centers rather than continue the folly of suburban sprawl. Additionally it calls for relocalization of our economy, a reversal of globalization, ending the "3000 mile ceasar salad", and other practices which result from abundant cheap energy supplies.

The core of the story is Peak oil, which is the theoretical construct studied by some scientists which predicts production from oil fields as they age. What's been observed over decades of oil production is that once the easy oil is pumped out of a field it is harder and harder and harder to extract the oil. The United States went past its peak of oil production in 1971 and its thought that the world went past its peak of oil production a year or three ago.

Economics 101 "supply and demand" theory says that a commodity with rising demand and decreasing supply will see an increasing price. Right? The history of oil usage is an ever increasing rate of use. That is, except for a short period in the late 70's to early 80's, immediately after the oil crises of the 1970's (and the Carter Administration years). The last few years have seen a wide range of fuel prices leaving us with gasoline cost far higher than recent history. The higher price hasn't been adequately explained to us. It's my belief that the root cause is production peak issues as predicted by the peak oil theory.

This is the sort of problem that The End of Surburbia asks the viewer to ponder. The movie doesn't dwell on questioning whether the peak oil theory is right or wrong. Clearly the people behind this movie assume that it is a correct theory, and their job is to put viewers through a thinking process about the folly of suburbia, the vast amounts of energy wasted to fund the suburban lifestyle, the vast amounts of energy wasted in globalization, and to ponder how we might survive through the coming crisis spawned by less energy availability.

The issue with suburbia itself is the low population density and the unwalkable nature of modern suburbs. Low population density means mass transit is an uneconomic unprofitable business which cannot survive (in most cases). Part of the reason for this is a concerted effort by General Motors, Firestone and Standard Oil to destroy mass transit (street car) systems all over the country replacing them with cars on rubber tires fueled by gasoline.

A byproduct of unwalkable cities is that we as a people have gotten out of the habit of casual exercise. We can't walk to the store, we can't walk to work, etc, instead we drive everywhere. Lack of casual exercise is a likely culprit in obesity.

The "3000 mile ceasar salad" is a way of describing a key flaw in globalization. Globalization is about shipping goods all over the world to serve a global search for the lowest price. The "3000 mile ceasar salad" is when globalization means the ingredients for your ceasar salad at lunch are shipped from 3000 (or more) miles away. An example of globalization is availability of fresh fruit in grocery stores all year long even when the fruit is out of season. This is enabled by cheap shipping costs in turn enabled by cheap abundant energy (fossil oil) supplies. If fuel costs continue rising it will make global-wide shipping expensive, making it unprofitable to ship ceasar salad ingredients across the world.

These are the things discussed in The End of Suburbia. It is an excellent movie, very informative, and for some it was a life-changing experience to watch.

AASIN: 

AASIN: 

The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Transition Guides)