Indian scientists develop wonder material 'black gold'

Indian scientists develop wonder material 'black gold'

 

It can find applications ranging from solar energy harvesting to seawater desalination.
This was what India was trying to do from the last twenty five years.Actually India was trying to find out a method about how the sea water which is full of salt could be converted into a water which would be useful for drinking and could be used for harvesting and agriculture.


It is not very appropriate to find out how much of water is present in either the greatest of the Sea in India say the Arabian Sea or in the Indian Ocean but it is very clear that the QUANTUM of the water that the three sea and the Oceans of India that India possesses, India has the capacity of supplying water to take care of the entire agriculture and also cleanse and feed the floras, the faunas and the animals if the sea water is desalinated .




There are some countries and the classical example are the Arabian countries where there are no sea’s at all. Then there is Israel to say which has no river. These countries salinate the water from the sea that they possess and use it for drinking. They remain safe and fine. If they can then the question is WHY CAN’T INDIA

 India : No Attempt Made To Desalinate The Sea or the Ocean water

 All these years, India has lived on the water that she got it from the rivers and ofcourse the water from the well as well as the water from ther BORE-PUMP .  India could pull along well and through for these many a years as the reservoir of the water was enough for these many a days to feed herself . However with the  deforestation and with the shrinkage of many a rivulets and rivers beside the uncleaned water that now most of the rivers have to offer, India is really facing a CRUNCH of a situation and if India within another  “ TWO TO THREE YEARS DOES NOT FALLS ON THE  IMPLEMENTATION USING THE TECHNIQUE OF “ MANAGEMENT OF WATER RESOURCES BY ALTERNATIVE THEN INDIA IS IN FULL DANGER OF BEING A WITNESS WHICH WOULD BE 100 TIMES MORE DREASDFUL THAN THE CORONA VIRUS ”  

 India THINKS of the CONVERSION of the UNNATURAL WATER into DRINKING WATER

 It is that under Mr rajiv Gandhi and his leadership India really had thought of cleansing the river ganges. However it could not be fructified in any manner. With the advent of Mr Natendra Modi at the HELMS  India has taken the job once more to cleanse the river Ganges.

 With such a NOBLE project and the idea in the mind when Mr Narendra Modi visited Israel for the FIRST time, India as we saw, both Mr Narendra Modi and the Premier of Israel got to the place where it was shown on the television set  about the machine that desalinates the water from the sea. It was announced that India would take those kind of machines from Israel and start desalinating the sea water. A noble idea indded but to what an extent this has moved ahead is to  be seen . India needs to plunge very fast to completely clean the river Ganges first and then it has to help the state to clean the rivers that holds importance for the states and then on a side-by-side basis India has to desalinate the  salty water and convert them into the drinking water.

SCIENTIST AT INDIA : SUCCESS “ KISSES ”  THEM FOR THEIR DISCOVERY

 There is a good news that I have learned through my research and one of the good news is that of late the Indian scientist have discovered the way and the method to desalinate the water as on the lines that I have explained here and the gist of the same is here .

Indian Scientists have tinkered with the chemistry of the yellow metal and have turned it into ‘black gold’. They claim that it can be potentially used for applications ranging from solar energy harvesting to desalinating seawater.

Scientists at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) used gold nanoparticles and by rearranging size and gaps between them developed a new material, which has unique properties such as capacity to absorb light and carbon dioxide. Gold does not have these properties, therefore ‘black gold’ is being called a new material. In appearance it is black, hence the name ‘black gold.’

The findings have been announced in Chemical Science, a scientific journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

 Proudly sharing their achievement and asserting all about their success the beaming Scientist and their team proclaim that “We have not doped gold nanoparticles with any other material or added other materials. We varied inter-particle distance between gold nanoparticles using a cycle-by-cycle growth approach by optimizing the nucleation-growth step, using dendritic fibrous nanosilica, whose fibers were used as the deposition site for gold nanoparticles,” explained Vivek Polshettiwar, who led the research team, while speaking to India Science Wire.

FASCINATING FEATURE AND THE PROPERTIES- ::

One of the most fascinating properties of the new material is its ability to absorb the entire visible and near-infrared region of solar light. It does so because of inter-particle plasmonic coupling as well as

heterogeneity in nanoparticle size. Black gold could also act as a catalyst and could convert carbon dioxide into methane at atmospheric pressure and temperature using solar energy.

Mr Polshettiwar was very candid and melancholied with his findings to explain that the findings that he and his team have done will have a many feature advantage in the field of BIO-SCIENCE as well. He adds that - :

“ If we develop an artificial tree with leaves made out of black gold, it can perform artificial photosynthesis, capturing carbon dioxide and converting it into fuel and other useful chemicals,” added Prof Polshettiwar. The efficiency of conversion of carbon dioxide into fuel, at present, is low but researchers believe it could be improved in future.

THE SOLAR ENERGY HARVESTING PROJECT AND ABILITY

In order to study solar energy harvesting ability of the new material, researchers dispersed it into water and exposed the solution to light for one hour and the temperature of the solution was measured. The temperature of the solution with pure silica spheres rose to 38

degrees while the ones with different concentrations of black gold rose to 67 to 88 degrees. The maximum increase in temperature was attributed creation of thermal hotspots due to the heterogeneity of the particle sizes as well as optimum inter- particle coupling.

Researchers said the material can be used as a nano-heater to covert seawater into potable water with good efficiency. “ Our results indicate the potential application of black gold in purification of seawater to potable water via steam generation using solar energy underatmospheric reaction conditions,” according to the researchers.

The Research Team - ::

The research team included Mahak Dhiman, Ayan Maity, Anirban Das, Rajesh Belgamwar, Bhagyashree Chalke and Vivek Polshettiwar (TIFT); Yeonhee Lee, Kyunjong Sim and Jwa-Min Nam (Seoul National University). The study was funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). 

Sun-powered desalination for villages in India

Off-grid Indian communities with salty groundwater could get potable water through a proposed solar technique.

Around the world, there is more salty groundwater than fresh, drinkable groundwater.

To cite an accurate example or to say for example, 60 percent of India is plagued and is underlain by salty water — and much of that area is not served by an electric grid that could run conventional reverse-osmosis desalination plants.

Now an analysis by MIT researchers shows that a different desalination technology called electrodialysis, powered by solar panels, could provide enough clean, palatable drinking water to supply the needs of a typical village.

 The study, by MIT graduate student Natasha Wright and Amos Winter, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, appears in the journal Desalination.

 Winter explains that finding optimal solutions to problems such as saline groundwater involves “detective work to understand the full set of constraints imposed by the market.” After weeks of field research in India, and reviews of various established technologies, he says, “when we put all these pieces of the puzzle together, it pointed very strongly to electrodialysis” — which is not what is commonly used in developing nations.

The factors that point to the choice of electrodialysis in India include both relatively low levels of salinity — ranging from 500 to 3,000 milligrams per liter, compared with seawater at about 35,000 mg/L — as well as the region’s lack of electrical power. (For on-grid locations, the team found, reverse-osmosis plants can be economically viable.)

Such moderately salty water is not directly toxic, but it can have long-term effects on health, and its unpleasant taste can cause people to turn to other, dirtier water sources. “It’s a big issue in the water-supply community,” Winter says.

Expanding access to safe water  :; The WRIGHT and WINTER TECHNOLOGY

 

By pairing village-scale electrodialysis systems — a bit smaller than the industrialunits typically produced today — with a simple set of solar panels an d a rial battery system to store the produced energy, Wright and Winter concluded, an economically viable and culturally acceptable system could supply enough water to meet the needs of a village of 2,000 to 5,000 people. They estimate that deployment of such systems would double the area of India in which groundwater — which is inherently safer, in terms of pathogen loads, than surface water — could provide acceptable drinking water.

 

While many homes in India currently use individual, home-based filtration systems to treat their water, Wright says after consulting with nongovernmental organizations that work in the area, she and Winter concluded that village-scale systems would be more effective — both because fewer people would be left out of access to clean water, and because home-based systems are much harder to monitor to ensure effective water treatment.

 

 Most organizations working to improve clean-water access focus their attention on controlling known pathogens and toxins such as arsenic, Wright says. But her analysis showed the importance of “what the water tastes like, smells like, and looks like.” Even if the water is technically safe to drink, that doesn’t solve the problem if people refuse to drink it because of the unpleasant salty taste, she says.

 

At the salinity levels seen in India’s groundwater, the researchers found, an electrodialysis system can provide fresh water for about half the energy required by a reverse-osmosis system. That means the solar panels and battery storage system can be half as big, more than offsetting the higher initial cost of the electrodialysis system itself.

 

How it works

 

Electrodialysis works by passing a stream of water between two electrodes with opposite charges. Because the salt dissolved in water consists of positive and negative ions, the electrodes pull the ions out of the water, Winter says, leaving fresher water at the center of the flow. A series of membranes separate the freshwater stream from increasingly salty ones.

 

Both electrodialysis and reverse osmosis require the use of membranes, but those in an electrodialysis system are exposed to lower pressures and can be cleared of salt buildup simply by reversing the electrical polarity. That means the expensive membranes should last much longer and require less maintenance, Winter says. In addition, electrodialysis systems recover a much higher percentage of the water — more than 90 percent, compared with about 40 to 60 percent from reverse-osmosis systems, a big advantage in areas where water is scarce.

 

Having carried out this analysis, Wright and Winter plan to put together a working prototype for field evaluations in India in January. While this approach was initially conceived for village-scale, self-contained systems, Winter says the same technology could also be useful for applications such as disaster relief, and for military use in remote locations.

Susan Amrose, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who was not involved in this work, says, “This paper raises the bar for the level and type of scientific rigor applied to the complex, nuanced, and extremely important problems of development engineering. …

 

Solar-ED isn’t a new technology, but it is novel to suggest developing it for systems in rural India, and even more novel to provide this level of detailed engineering and economic analysis to back up the suggestion.”

 

Amrose adds, “The water scarcity challenges facing India in the near future cannot be overstated. India has a huge population living on top of brackish water sources in regions that are water-scarce or about to become water-scarce. A solution with the potential to double recoverable water in an environment where water is becoming more precious by the day could have a huge impact.”

The research was funded by Jain Irrigation Systems, an Indian company that builds and installs solar-power systems, and sponsored by the Tata Center for Technology and Design at MIT.

 

Matter of Importance - ::

 

The water resources of India at the most stands at the level of FOUR YEARS from now only. Therefater it will be very hard for the Indioans to survive without drinking water

The category of the water ought to be separated for drinking by the living beings and for the agriculture as well as for other uses .It is BUT NECESSARY to take a plunge right from now at this point and start working on it.

We have the pool and the infrastructure aided by the brilliant Scientists who have worked so precariously on the project of  “ water desalination ”   and are in a state of matter and affairs to take the same research and the experiment to the next higher level with the capabilities and the capacity that they have .

The Government of the day has to RISE UP and act fast before it becomes too late .As they say - ::

BETTER “ LATE ” THAN “ NEVER ”

Regards

Shyamal Bhattacharjee