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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

That is a really fascinating result. It would also explain the mechanism of graphene sieves. One of the really amazing behaviors of graphene is that you can pour water on top of it, and pure water pops out of the bottom[1].

[1] http://phys.org/news/2016-03-revolutionary-graphene-filter-c...

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Until, of course, it becomes completely clogged.

Ultra-fine filters are going to get locked up by debris quickly.

Fortunately, you can probably replace a graphene filter quickly with plenty more freely available/easily producible graphene (quality and practicality of diy graphene might be dubiuous), but, considering the clean-room level of filtration, I'd figure you might need LOTS of graphene, and several layers of coarse filtration, before filtering at the nano-scale.

I don't think we need to drink water THAT pure though. Although, I guess I'm only thinking about the practical application as a water filter, but I imagine it could be useful in purifying water for science.

Is there no way to work a cleaning mechanism into the material? Dry it and static charge?

So it deionizes the water too? Wow. If this technology does the same, doesn't that imply we'd need to supply people using this as a source of water with electrolytes and minerals for the water?

Mineralizing water is pretty straight forward, treating it to safe drinking levels is much more complex. So if you simplfy 80% of the water treatment facility's job, you can often process significantly more water through it at the same cost.

How is it different from desalination where you add some of the salt back in because the water is too pure?

I often wonder if this matters anymore, since food has a high amount of salt, and minerals.

The food in developing countries doesn't necessarily.

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