Gas and water flow far more rapidly through membranes that use carbon nanotubes as pores than through conventional membranes with pores 10 times or so wider, experts tell UPI’s Nano World.”This is like having a garden hose that can deliver as much water in the same amount of time as a fire hose that is 10 times larger,” said researcher Olgica Bakajin, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

These findings could lead to more efficient filters. “The two biggest applications we see are the separation of industrial gases and water purification, demineralization and desalination,” said Jason Holt, a materials scientist postdoctoral researcher also at Livermore.

What the researchers surprisingly found in membranes made with the nanotubes were “gas permeabilities that are 1,000 percent and water permeabilities that are 10,000 percent greater than for polycarbonate,” Bakajin said. She and her colleagues reported their findings in the May 19 issue of the journal Science.

The Livermore and University of California at Berkeley team attributes its findings to the breakdown of classical models at the infinitesimal length scale of carbon nanotubes. Classical models do not account “for the ‘billiard ball-like’ collisions between gas molecules and the nanotube surface, which would enhance the gas transport rates,” she explained.

Classical models also do not account for the intrinsic slipperiness of nanotube surfaces that possess virtually atomic smoothness, which may help account for the water-flow enhancement. In addition, molecular ordering processes may occur at the tiny one to two nanometer length scales of single-walled carbon nanotubes.

Anything, of course, that contributes to cost-effective desalinization can be a boon to most of the world. We ain’t exactly swimming in an excess of fresh water.