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Article: Improved techniques may boost desalination.
- Article from:
- R & D
- Article date:
- May 1, 1991
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1991 Advantage Business Media. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Interest in desalination techniques is heating up in the U.S. as droughtstricken areas of California and other regions struggle--and often fail--to maintain adequate supplies of potable water.
Costs for the processes are still relatively high but have been decreasing. R&D into new membrane systems for reverse osmosis (RO) should bring costs down even more.
An example is a type of membrane produced by a new thermal-inversion process developed at the Lawrence Berkeley (CA) Laboratory (LBL). The microporous anisotropic polymer membranes have very closely controlled pore sizes and porosity gradients, which make RO more efficient, LBL researches say.
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