reverse osmosis membranes, precipitation of some salts, and vaporization

Turge, I meant out of the media which traps the minerals. You are not going to vaporize calcium and Magnesium and Iron. How will they get it out of the molecular traps to re-use them? Or do they just throw them "away"?

More likely they are either recycled or thrown away.

Turge, I meant out of the media which traps the minerals. You are not going to vaporize calcium and Magnesium and Iron. How will they get it out of the molecular traps to re-use them? Or do they just throw them "away"?

As regard Ca,Na, Mg, etc., I meant boil off the water, then distill. For molecular filtering reverse flow and flush.

gkam

What I don't know is how they keep F, Cl, and Br ions from getting through as their ionic radius are so small.

this has great potential

The article is not clear regarding the projected energy consumption with respect to the thermodynamic limit for any reversible desalination process. See http://urila.trip...tion.htm which was the first hit I got from a simple web search. All the article does is imply vaguely that reverse osmosis exceeds that limit by a factor of 2 or 3. Please could we have some precise scientific information?

I did read:
http://urila.trip...tion.htm
https://arstechni...it-gets/
And the paper http://advances.s...eaaq0066

This paper speaks to subnanometer filtration. One nanometer equals 1000 picometers. A Cl anion would have a diameter of less than 160 nanometers and a Na ion less than 380, depending on which, calculated or empirical radii used.
This method of ion extraction looks to be very different than simply filtering Na and Cl ions. The top of the illustration on page 3 illustrates what this paper defines as a hydrated ion. This is different than simple hydration. The number of weakly (my guess) bound H2O atom is huge per anion and cation, making the hydrated ion relatively huge. The ionic attraction of H2O is due to the fact that H2O is diamagnetic or the charge on water is polar.

cont.

Note the orientation of the water molecules. This makes the hydrated diameter relatively huge. In the top illustration on page 4 lower right quarter illustration is the sieve which uses a dehydration/hydration process. This appears to be a novel approach.

This is a non-expert interpretation of the paper.