Written by Tony Malkovic Thursday, 19 March 2009 10:51
PERTH researchers are working to mimic the way salts and fluids pass through the cells of the human body in order to develop better and cheaper ways of making drinking water through desalination.
Molecular biophysicist Dr Ben Corry’s research focuses on the biological ion channels that regulate salts in the human body and allow nerve signalling.
“With your body for instance, when you want to tell your hand to clench, what you get is electrical signals,” he says.
“And these are carried by salts moving in and out of cells.
“Ion channels are the things that regulate this process. They’re essentially pores in the cell walls or membranes that open and close at the appropriate time to let this electrical charge in and out and to generate a nerve signal.”
Corry is an ARC Research Fellow at the University of WA’s School of Biomedical, Biomolecular and Chemical Science.
“There are also ion channels that allow water to pass in and out of cells but not ions or salts,” he says.
“In fact, that’s exactly what you want if you desalinating water, where you’re trying to remove the salts from water.
“This has given us a biological inspiration for some new strategies for desalinating water.”
Corry says that the most common desalination method is reverse osmosis, where seawater is forced under pressure through a membrane that allows water to pass but not salt or other impurities.
“The big issue is that it takes a lot of pressure to drive the water through these membranes, so if you could design new membranes to allow you to push the water through at lower pressure, while still rejecting the salt, that would reduce the energy costs in desalinating water.
“The idea essentially is to make a membrane that mimics the biological channels and by doing so desalinate water at a lower cost.”
Corry’s theoretical and computational research saw him win the $50,000 Young Scientist of the Year prize as part of the Premier’s Science Awards announced late last year.
Much of the work of Corry and his team is undertaken at the iVEC high-performance computing centre in Bentley.
“The majority of what we do is computer modelling of how these biological pores and the synthetic pores would work,” he says.
“And because we’re working at the molecular level, with all the atoms and molecules moving around, it takes a lot of computer power to simulate that in detail, so that’s where iVEC comes in.
“The part I play is with the detailed processes on the computational side to essentially show this idea is feasible and could work if we could make these membranes.”
Corry says small prototypes of the new synthetic membranes for desalination are being developed in the US but a working model might be several years off.
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