ARMONK, N.Y., July 6, 2015
/PRNewswire/ -- According to a paper published today in the
journal Nature Nanotechnology, scientists discovered a phenomenon
in which the use of carbon nanotubes, under specific conditions,
could potentially lead to more efficient water filtering with less
expense and less impact on the environment.
The researchers' study of nanotubes -- material that shows
promise for a variety of technologies -- was enabled by a virtual
supercomputer created by IBM (NYSE: IBM) in which volunteers
channel the surplus processing power of their computing devices to
scientists for use in conducting simulations.
Carbon nanotubes – tiny, hollow structures made of a material
related to graphite in pencils – are so small that they may filter
out impurities from water flowing through them. The scientific
community initially expected that their narrow diameters would slow
the water's flow. Surprisingly, early experiments hinted that water
is not impeded in the expected way as it passes through
nanotubes.
To understand why, a distinguished team of international
researchers led by scientists at Tsinghua University undertook an
unprecedented, massive computational simulation study powered by
IBM's World Community Grid to find out what was behind this
surprise. Prior simulations performed by the scientific community
were unable to study the process at realistic water flow rates
because that would have required considerably more costly computing
power than typically available.
The new simulations were conducted using the massive computing
power of IBM's crowdsourced World Community Grid, which revealed
that under certain conditions, the natural, random thermal
vibrations of atoms in nanotubes could have a significant effect on
water moving through them. The researchers discovered that these
vibrations, called phonons, can actually enhance the rate of water
diffusion -- a kind of flow -- by more than 300%, as a result of
reduced friction.
Researchers led by the Center for Nano and Micro Mechanics at
Tsinghua University in Beijing
performed vast simulations using the donated, surplus processing
power of IBM's World Community Grid, which harnesses three million
linked computers from more than 700,000 "citizen-scientist"
volunteers worldwide. The nearly 100 million calculations performed
by IBM's virtual, crowdsourced supercomputer for the Computing For
Clean Water project would have cost USD $15 million had they been performed commercially,
and would have taken more than 37,000 years had they been performed
on a single-processor PC. Instead, the work was completed at no
cost to scientists and in a fraction of the time.
With this newfound understanding of the phenomenon, researchers
now hope to optimize the nanotubes and apply them to improve water
filtration and seawater desalination. As freshwater reserves
dwindle worldwide, an improved and less costly purification process
could help quench thirst and grow crops. Nearly one billion people
around the world currently lack access to safe drinking water.
The new understanding of this phenomenon may also lead to a
better understanding of how chemicals and drugs pass through tiny
channels in human cell walls, potentially leading to improvements
in medicines. With further research, it might also be possible to
apply these findings to improve a process that creates energy when
freshwater and saltwater are mixed, a process known as osmotic
power.
International collaborators who contributed to this important
discovery include researchers from Tsinghua University, University
College London, Tel Aviv University, University of Geneva,
University of Sydney, Monash University, and Xi'an Jiaotong
University.
"Prior to our project, simulations of water flow in carbon
nanotubes could only be carried out under unrealistically high
flow-rate conditions," says Quanshui Zheng, Director of Tsinghua
University's Center for Nano and Micro Mechanics. "Thanks to IBM's
crowdsourced World Community Grid, the Computing for Clean Water
project could extend such simulations to probe flow rates of just a
few centimeters per second, characteristic of the working
conditions of real nanotube-based filters."
World Community Grid was conceived and is managed by IBM. Hosted
on IBM's SoftLayer cloud technology, World Community Grid provides
massive, free computing power to scientists by harnessing the
unused, surplus cycle time of a number of volunteers' computers and
mobile devices from all over the globe. World Community Grid
software receives, completes, and returns small computational
assignments to scientists. The combined power available on World
Community Grid has created one of the most powerful and fastest
virtual supercomputers on the planet, advancing scientific work by
hundreds of years.
More than three million computers and mobile devices used by
approximately 700,000 people globally and 460 institutions from 80
countries have contributed virtual supercomputing power for vitally
important projects on World Community Grid over the last 10 years.
Since the program's inception, World Community Grid has powered
nearly two-dozen important research projects, donating more than
one million years of computing time worth $400 million to scientific research, and enabled
important scientific advances in areas as diverse as cancer
research, AIDS treatments, genetic mapping, solar energy and
ecosystem preservation. More than 2.4 billion research tasks have
been completed to date; more than 1.5 million new tasks are
processed every day.
IBM invites researchers to submit research project proposals to
receive this free resource, and encourages members of the public to
donate their unused computing power to these efforts at
worldcommunitygrid.org
World Community Grid is enabled by Berkeley Open Infrastructure
for Network Computing (BOINC), an open source platform developed at
the University of California, Berkeley
and with support from the National Science Foundation. The BOINC
project choreographs the technical aspects of volunteer
computing.
For more information about IBM's philanthropic efforts, please
visit www.citizenIBM.com
Contact(s) information
Ari Fishkind
IBM Media Relations
1 (914) 499-6420
fishkind@us.ibm.com
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150701/227654
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO
To view the original version on PR Newswire,
visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibms-virtual-supercomputer-finds-clean-water-clue-300108151.html
SOURCE IBM