Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Seawater Separation by Osmosis

Waffles SS - 18-1-2011 at 02:06

Sea water contain different components
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm

This is possible to separation certain component from seawater by Osmosis method?

For example:Strontium or Molybdenum or..

peach - 18-1-2011 at 04:20

I suspect it is at a lab scale, but not at a scale that'd be cheaper than simply digging them up - yet.

Of coarse, it would be brilliant if you had a membrane that could dropped into the sea on buoys, left and then would be full of gold and platinum on returning.

I heard of a green power idea that actually seemed like a decent idea recently, which was to use membranes at points where fresh and salt water meet. This design would then extract energy from the membranes as the two move through the naturally occurring osmotic gradient - like a fuel cell. The simplicity, cost and complete lack of moving parts I enjoyed.

Quote:
A number of people have claimed to be able to economically recover gold from sea water, but so far they have all been either mistaken or crooks. A so-called reverend, Prescott Jernegan ran a gold-from-seawater swindle in the United States in the 1890s. A British fraudster ran the same scam in England in the early 1900s.[44] Fritz Haber (the German inventor of the Haber process) did research on the extraction of gold from sea water in an effort to help pay Germany's reparations following World War I.[45] Based on the published values of 2 to 64 ppb of gold in seawater a commercially successful extraction seemed possible. After analysis of 4000 water samples yielding an average of 0.004 ppb it became clear that the extraction would not be possible and he stopped the project.[46] No commercially viable mechanism for performing gold extraction from sea water has yet been identified. Gold synthesis is not economically viable and is unlikely to become so in the foreseeable future


Whilst looking at Sedit's ceramics and microwave heating, I also found a guy on youtube claiming he could extract significant quantities of gold from beer bottle glass by heating it in the microwave.

I am a strong supporter of the wackier claims, as the most ground breaking science is usually the thing that causes the most controversy or head shaking, but making big claims, never producing ANY evidence of ANYTHING related to it and then insisting people buy your DVD is iffy.

As someone pointed out in the video, he wouldn't be selling DVD's if he could mine that much gold from the mountains of broken glass available.

Waffles SS - 18-1-2011 at 06:30

As you know seawater contain very very small amount of gold but contain more Molybdenum or Strontium(
I think this is more economically that we working on Molybdenum extraction)
I think this device should has special membrane.

[Edited on 18-1-2011 by Waffles SS]