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#1 WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

Computing for Clean Water



Project Status and Findings:
The research team has discovered a phenomenon that can improve access to clean water for the nearly one billion people who lack access to it. By using World Community Grid to simulate water flow through carbon nanotubes at an unprecedented level of detail, researchers discovered that under specific conditions, certain kinds of natural vibrations of atoms inside the nanotubes can lead to a 300% increased rate of diffusion (a kind of flow) of water through the nanotubes.
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Their groundbreaking findings have many possible applications, including the potential to improve water filtration technology and more efficient desalination, as well as possible applications in clean energy and medicine. The research team was able to make this discovery because of the unprecedented amount of computing power made available through World Community Grid, allowing them to run sufficiently detailed simulations. Learn more.

For more information about this project and its results, please refer to our News section, as well as the researchers' project website. If you have comments or questions about this project, please visit the Computing for Clean Water forum.

Mission
The mission of Computing for Clean Water is to provide deeper insight on the molecular scale into the origins of the efficient flow of water through a novel class of filter materials. This insight will in turn guide future development of low-cost and more efficient water filters.

Significance
Lack of access to clean water is one of the major humanitarian challenges for many regions in the developing world. It is estimated that 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion have little or no sanitation. Millions of people die annually - estimates are 3,900 children a day - from the results of diseases transmitted through unsafe water, in particular diarrhea.

Technologies for filtering dirty water exist, but are generally quite expensive. Desalination of sea water, a potentially abundant source of drinking water, is similarly limited by filtering costs. Therefore, new approaches to efficient water filtering are a subject of intense research. Carbon nanotubes, stacked in arrays so that water must pass through the length of the tubes, represent a new approach to filtering water.

Approach
Normally, the extremely small pore size of nanotubes, typically only a few water molecules in diameter, would require very large pressures and hence expensive equipment in order to filter useful amounts of water. However, in 2005 experiments showed that such arrays of nanotubes allow water to flow at much higher rates than expected. This surprising result has spurred many scientists to invest considerable effort in studying the underlying processes that facilitate water flow in nanotubes.

This project uses large-scale molecular dynamics calculations - where the motions of individual water molecules through the nanotubes are simulated - in order to get a deeper understanding of the mechanism of water flow in the nanotubes. For example, there has been speculation about whether the water molecules in direct contact with the nanotube might behave more like ice. This in turn might reduce the friction felt by the rest of the water, hence increasing the rate of flow. Realistic computer simulations are one way to test such hypotheses.

Ultimately, the scientists hope to use the insights they glean from the simulations in order to optimize the underlying process that is enabling water to flow much more rapidly through nanotubes and other nanoporous materials. This optimization process will allow water to flow even more easily, while retaining sources of contamination. The simulations may also reveal under what conditions such filters can best assist in a desalination process.
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#2 Re: WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

About the Project

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World Community Grid and researchers at a newly launched multidisciplinary mechanics and innovation center, CNMM, at Tsinghua University are working together to understand the molecular scale properties of a new class of efficient and inexpensive water filter materials, which may help to satisfy demand for cheap, clean drinking water in developing countries.

Clean water is often compared to oil, as a limited resource that has been often squandered over the last decades, and is increasingly expensive to produce. Sources of clean water, in particular underground aquifers, are being depleted at alarming rates in many parts of the world. As the planet's population grows, this situation will only get worse, and may be exacerbated by climate change.

According to a recent special report on water in The Economist, the proportion of people living in countries that are chronically short of water will rise from 8% of the world's population at the turn of the 21st century to 45% by 2050, which by then will represent 4 billion people.

Although every school child knows that our planet is covered mainly in water, most of that water - over 97% - is salt water that can only be transformed into drinking water by an expensive desalination process. Of the roughly 3% of water that is not salty, 70% is frozen at the poles. So with the exception of marine life, all animals on the planet have to survive on less than 1% of the planet's available water.

In parts of the world where water is scarce, and the population density high, lack of access to clean water is a major source of diseases such as diarrhea, which in turn can cause malnutrition. And childhood malnutrition is linked with lifelong health issues that affect people's productivity. Estimates are that the long-term impact of diarrhea may reach 4-5% of GDP in some countries.

As a result, a great number of scientists are focusing their attention on novel ways to produce clean drinking water from contaminated or salty water. Purification of water normally involves several steps, which can be based on principles that are physical (sand filters) chemical (chlorination) or even biological (treatment ponds).

Filtering under pressure
A common type of water purification system relies on pressurizing water in order to force it through membranes with microscopic holes. This is the case of so-called ultrafiltration membranes, used to filter out dissolved substances that might get through larger sand-based filters.

This is also the principle behind the process known as reverse osmosis for producing fresh water from salt water. Reverse osmosis requires external mechanical pressure to counter the osmotic pressure that occurs across semi-permeable membranes which prevent salt flowing through. In the absence of external pressure, fresh water crosses the membrane to dilute the salt water on the other side. By applying high pressure on the salt water side, the water is forced to cross from the salt water side to the fresh water side. Since the membrane prevents salt from crossing, more fresh water is obtained on the low pressure side of the membrane.

Reverse osmosis normally requires pressures of tens of atmospheres to overcome this equilibrium and to keep fresh water flowing through the membrane. Producing such high pressures, and membranes that can withstand them, is expensive. This explains in part why reverse osmosis still only accounts for a very small fraction of drinking water produced around the world.

Nanotechnology to the rescue
Nanotechnology is a buzz word in fields as diverse as electronics, renewable energy and medical diagnostics. And carbon nanotubes - essentially rolled up atomic layers of ordinary graphite, the material used in pencils - are one of the most promising materials in nanotechnology.

One of the most important features of nanotechnology is that, as common objects and devices shrink in size towards the atomic scale, many of their properties can no longer simply be extrapolated from the macro and micro scales, but rather the properties change in radical and often highly beneficial ways. This is the case for water flowing through arrays of nanotubes.

Normally, as the pore size in an ultrafiltration membrane shrinks, so, too, does the rate at which water will flow through the pore. In fact, the rate falls off drastically, roughly as the fourth power of radius of the pore: shrink the pore size by half and the flow ebbs by a factor of 1/16.

But results first published by researchers at the University of Kentucky in the US in 2005 showed that, for flow through membranes made of carbon nanotubes, this was not the case. Indeed, the measured flow rates were many times higher than simple extrapolation from larger pore sizes would have suggested.

Such a dramatic enhancement suggests that great savings could be made in terms of the necessary pressure, and hence the energy involved in pushing water through filters made of nanotubes. Already, many researchers are pursuing this line of inquiry, and attempting to make a new class of low-cost and highly efficient filters this way.

It is always a long way from discovery to practical devices. And one of the important steps on the way is to understand more deeply the physical origins of this enhanced behavior of carbon nanotubes, in order to better exploit it. This is precisely the focus of the research at CNMM, where computer simulations have been used to study the phenomenon at the scale of individual water molecules, using a technique called molecular dynamics.

The story so far
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As far back as 1823, it was suggested by the French physicist and engineer, Claude-Louis Navier, that under ideal conditions, it would require a vanishingly small force, or 'shear stress' to make a fluid slip across a solid surface. In other words, the flow would be essentially friction-free. This idea has never been fully verified, but the recently observed enhanced flow rates of water through membranes of carbon nanotubes suggest that some form of this effect may well be at play in these systems.

Using molecular dynamics simulations, the Tsinghua researchers recently found by simulation that there is a logarithmic relationship between the shear stress in the nanotubes and the velocity of the water, which appears to be valid for a wide range of assumptions about the properties of the carbon nanotubes, and the way water might stick to them - the so-called wetting properties of the water-nanotube interface.

This logarithmic relationship appears to hold for slip velocities down to about 1m/s, which is the lower limit of what could be simulated. If this relationship holds at much lower velocities, characteristic of the real conditions in experiments where nanotube water filters have been used, then it could provide a significant clue to why water appears to flow so fast in the nanotubes.

Yet although the lower bound of velocity studied by the Tsinghua group is the lowest of any molecular dynamics study to date, it is still at least one order of magnitude higher than the upper bound of the experimental flow rate range, and several orders of magnitude larger than the flow rates expected in practical devices that would use this effect.

How you and World Community Grid can make a difference
Since compute time scales roughly as the inverse square of the flow rate, the Tsinghua researchers estimate that a compute time of 460 years on a typical desktop computer with a single core processor is required to simulate flow rates comparable with the upper bound measured in experiments. To extend the simulations to velocities of about 1cm/s or less, typical of practical devices, would require another factor of 400 or more in compute time, for a total of 184,000 years. And to simulate a representative range of carbon nanotube pore sizes would require a further factor of 10 to 100, bringing the total compute time to well over a million years.

Scientifically, it is essential to explore this low-velocity region in order to compare simulations directly with experiment, rather than simply trying to extrapolate from higher velocity simulations. Such extrapolation is particularly problematic because of the possibility of non-linear phenomena that may occur at low velocities. For example, stick-slip phenomena occur in solid friction as velocity is reduced, and may be anticipated to play a role in the water layer immediately in contact with the carbon nanotube, since water is known to form an ice-like pattern near the carbon nanotube surface.

Given the very large computing requirements for pursuing this research, which far outstrip the capabilities of the in-house cluster available to the Tsinghua team, World Community Grid and volunteers like you can make a crucial difference, by providing access to far more computing power than researchers could otherwise afford.

The result of this project will not only allow us to test the predictions of Navier, thus contributing to fundamental knowledge about hydrodynamics on the nanoscale, but should also provide insight in how to further optimize fluid flow through carbon nanotube membranes and other forms of nanoscale membranes.

Specifically, the Tsinghua team expects to gain a better physical understanding of optimum pore size as a function of flow rate, which can guide the synthesis and fabrication of future, highly efficient carbon nanotube filter membranes, as well as suggest alternative approaches to making inexpensive water filtration systems.
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#3 Re: WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

C4CW September 2013 Project Status Update
With the help of World Community Grid volunteers we have accumulated a large amount of data with very small statistical error. This data enabled us to get a much deeper understanding about water transport through very small channels (in our case, carbon nanotubes with diameters of about a few nanometers.) To our best knowledge, the phenomena we observed from these results are quite novel and the underlying mechanisms may have impacts in this scientific field. Currently, we are working hard on summarizing the results in a nice paper which will soon be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. This is the first step of the normal process of contributing scientific research to the human society. We will report our progress on the forum as soon as we get into the next stage and thanks again for all your contributions to this project!
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#4 Re: WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

Computing for Clean Water project update
By: Dr. Francois Grey
CNMM, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and Citizen Cyberscience Centre, Geneva, Switzerland
25 Apr 2014

Summary
Researchers announce the end of the project as they complete further studies to confirm interesting results gained from World Community Grid data and prepare to publish their exciting findings.

Over the past six months, we have been doing further analysis of the results we obtained from the Computing for Clean Water project, in order to finalize a manuscript for publication. We've now reached a level of confidence in our findings that we don't believe any further runs on World Community Grid are necessary, which marks the end of the project on World Community Grid. We aim to submit our manuscript in the coming few weeks, once all co-authors have had a chance to review it.

As we've mentioned before, the results we got from Computing for Clean Water were surprising in several ways. Since Computing for Clean Water allows us to effectively extend simulations to a new flow regime that is closer to what happens in real experiments (see the diagram below), we're being very cautious about testing our surprising results in different ways, to make sure that what we see is a genuine effect, and not some unexpected artifact of the way we are doing the calculations.

We'll be able to tell you more about exactly why our results are so surprising once the article has been submitted for publication. At that point, we'll release a so-called electronic preprint, so that colleagues – and you, the Computing for Clean Water volunteers – can see the results, too. For the moment, though, suffice to say that we're very excited about having discovered a new mechanism that could make water filtration by nanotubes much more efficient. This mechanism appears to have been overlooked in previous studies because they did not have the computing power to simulate the flow process in the sort of detail that we can with Computing for Clean Water.

The diagram below succinctly captures the big step forward that Computing for Clean Water enabled us to make in terms of bridging the gap between the (high) flow velocity that prior simulations have managed to study, and the (low) range of flow velocities for which practical experiments on water flow in nanotubes have been carried out.

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So you may be wondering, what exactly have we been doing for the last few months, since we stopped running jobs on Computing for Clean Water? Well, the first step, before asking for independent feedback from reviewers, is to have scientists involved in the project directly ask tough questions about the results. To answer those questions we have needed to do further computations, carried out on computing clusters in the UK and in Australia. (Technical aside: these tests represent a much smaller volume of calculations than the Computing for Clean Water project. However, each calculation generates much larger data files than a corresponding Computing for Clean Water task. So doing these tests on a dedicated computing resource makes sense.)

These further computations supported the initial conclusions we drew from analyzing the Computing for Clean Water data. And as mentioned above, this gives us the confidence we needed to move ahead with publishing these findings.

We want to sincerely thank World Community Grid volunteers for supporting our work and for allowing us to extend our simulations to such a realistic level. While our work on World Community Grid comes to an end, our research efforts continue and we look forward to sharing details of our exciting findings and any further developments in the coming months.
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#5 Re: WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

Computing for Clean Water on the road to publication
By: Dr. Francois Grey
CNMM, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and Citizen Cyberscience Centre, Geneva, Switzerland
9 Feb 2015

Summary
The Computing for Clean Water team has written a paper describing the results of their research on World Community Grid. They’ve described the novel flow effect that all you volunteers helped discover. Their paper is currently under consideration at a prestigious journal.
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The scientific process has many phases, and one of the most challenging of these is publishing results. What often amounts to years of a scientist’s working life has to be distilled to just a few pages, and done so in a way that is both clear and compelling - at least for other experts in the field. The team behind Computing for Clean Water worked for many months last year on drafting and polishing such an article, which sums up several years of work. Indeed, if we included all the processing time that you, the volunteers, have contributed to the project with your PCs and laptops, we could argue that the article represents many thousands of years of collective effort!

The article was submitted to a prestigious journal. Choosing the right journal is always a tough process; the most famous journals apply very strict criteria, which mean that even excellent articles get rejected, simply because the editor decides they are not of an adequate level of significance. This is inevitably a harsh blow for the scientists involved, but a necessary procedure; you don’t get selected for the Olympics unless you are a truly outstanding athlete, and in much the same way, top journals need to be very selective.

We have been waiting several months now to see whether we are amongst the lucky few, or whether we will have to revise our article and perhaps consider submitting it to a less demanding journal. Ultimately, the goal is to get the information out there so other people can benefit from it. So there is always a balance between wanting to ensure the broadest possible audience for our results by publishing in a top journal, and simply ensuring that the information is accessible to other scientists, by publishing in a more lenient one. In the case of Computing for Clean Water, it’s fair to say that the whole team behind this project feels an additional responsibility to the large community of volunteers, to do the best possible job of promoting their diligent efforts.

So thanks again to all the volunteers on Computing for Clean Water for your help and for your patience with this process. Rest assured that you will be the first to know when and where the results will be published.

The Computing for Clean Water team
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#6 Re: WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

Enhancing the potential for nanotechnology to improve access to clean water for millions
By: Dr. Francois Grey
CNMM, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and Citizen Cyberscience Centre, Geneva, Switzerland
6 Jul 2015

Summary
The Computing for Clean Water team has discovered how water can pass through tiny carbon nanotubes much more easily than previously predicted. This groundbreaking understanding of a fundamental physical process holds potential for improving access to clean water for millions through more efficient water filtration and desalination, as well as possible applications in clean energy and medicine. This discovery has been published in Nature Nanotechnology, the world's most prestigious nanotechnology journal.



Our team has discovered a phenomenon which forms an important step forward on the path to making clean water available to those who need it most. Clean water is fundamental to life, and yet nearly a billion people worldwide lack access to it. This isn't just a matter of convenience: over a million people die every year from diseases caused by unclean water. With population growth and climate change, the problem is expected to get worse. Existing water filter technologies are often expensive, and the people who need them most are least able to afford them. The Computing for Clean Water research that you powered can help change that status quo. These exciting findings were just published in Nature Nanotechnology, the world's most prestigious nanotechnology journal.

Fundamentally, our discovery is about how we can potentially use carbon nanotubes to make water filters that are more efficient and less expensive. Carbon nanotubes are made of single-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms, called graphene, rolled up into tiny tubes, with diameters of just a few nanometers - one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. The size of the tubes allows water molecules to pass through, but blocks larger pathogens and contaminants, purifying the water. They are so small that the scientific community initially expected that water would move through them too slowly to be useful. However, earlier experiments showed that water sometimes passes through them much more easily than expected.

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Representation of volunteers contributing to the study of water within carbon nanotubes

Increased flow could mean a more efficient filter, but due to lack of sufficient computing power, until now there had been a wide gap between what scientists could understand from computer simulations, and what they could actually measure in experiments. Our research efforts focused on bridging this gap. By running massive computer simulations on World Community Grid with your help, we discovered that certain kinds of natural vibrations called phonons, under specific conditions, can lead to a 300%+ increased rate of diffusion (a kind of flow) of water through carbon nanotubes, compared to previous theoretical predictions. Importantly, since these tiny vibrations occur naturally due to thermal (heat) energy inherently stored in all materials, no external energy source is required to take advantage of this phenomenon.

What does this discovery mean for future research? The immediate application is in using the new insights from our simulations to design more efficient water filters. If experiments confirm our predictions, such filters could help improve access to clean water for millions of people worldwide. Our predictions may also lead to a less expensive method for desalinating water (the process of obtaining fresh water from sea water).

Utilizing this nanoscale phenomenon, it may be possible to construct membranes and filters that can revolutionize many processes and industries that involve water or other fluids. For instance, this discovery may reveal insights on how chemicals and medicines are transported through tiny channels in the walls of living cells. With further research, it might also be possible to apply these findings to improve a process that creates clean energy when freshwater and saltwater are mixed, a process known as osmotic power.

These diverse possibilities are only imaginable because of your generosity: no other research group had ever had the necessary computing power to run sufficiently detailed simulations to be able to compare directly with the flow conditions in real filters. By partnering with World Community Grid and the 150,000 volunteers who participated in this project, we were able to simulate water flow at a level of detail never attempted before, which revealed a phenomenon that had not been detected in previous studies.

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Members of the Computing for Clean Water team: Zhiping Xu, Ming Ma Quanshui Zheng and Francois Grey

This work was a result of a global collaboration between researchers from China, Switzerland, Israel, the United Kingdom and Australia. Thanks to your participation, we were able to accomplish in just a few years what would have taken 40,000 years of computing on a single computer. On behalf of the entire team, I want to say thank you to the 150,000 World Community Grid volunteers who helped us run this research. This breakthrough belongs to you as well.


Learn more and join World Community Grid to power the next scientific breakthrough:


深入挖掘纳米技术潜力,改善数百万人难以获取清洁水的现状

清水计算团队发现了使水以更简单的方式流过微型碳纳米管的新方法。这一突破性发现可用于开发更高效的水过滤和淡化技术,从而改善数百万人难以获取清洁水的现状。该发现还可用于清洁能源和医疗行业。全球最知名的纳米技术期刊《自然纳米技术》已经发表了这一研究成果。

我们团队的这一发现将推动清洁水技术的发展,从而使有迫切需求的人们获得清洁水。清洁水是生命的基础,目前全球有近 10 亿人无法获得清洁水。这不仅仅是便捷性问题:每年逾百万人死于由于水质问题引发的疾病。随着人口增长和气候变化,这一问题将愈发严重。现有的水过滤技术通常价格高昂,需要清洁水的人们大都无法承受。您所支持的清水计算研究有助于改变这一现状。全球最知名的纳米技术期刊《自然纳米技术》已经发表了这些激动人心的研究成果。

我们从根本上发现了如何将碳纳米管用于制造更高效、更低成本的滤水器。碳纳米管采用单层原子厚度的碳原子板制成,这种材料被称为石墨烯,经弯曲后形成细管状,直径仅为几纳米,相当于人的头发直径的万分之一。碳纳米管的大小足以使水分子通过,但会挡住较大的病原菌和污染物,使水得到净化。碳纳米管的直径极小,以至于科学界最初认为水通过碳纳米管的速度极慢,因此不具有实用性。但早期的实验表明,水通过碳纳米管的速度有时会大大超过预期。

水的流速加快意味着更高效的过滤,但由于缺少足够的计算能力,科学家通过计算机模拟的数据与在实验中取得的实际测量结果存在巨大差异。我们的研究工作重点是努力缩小这一差异。通过全球网格大同盟的巨大计算模拟能力,我们发现了一种称为“声子”的自然振动。在特定的条件下,这种振动能够使通过碳纳米管的水分扩散(一种水流)速度提高 300% 以上。重要的是,这些振动源于所有物体本身具有的热能,无需外部能量就能够自然发生。

这一发现对于未来研究有何意义?从模拟中获得的新发现可以立即用于设计更高效的滤水器。如果实验能够验证我们的预测,这种过滤器将可以帮助改善全球数百万人难以获取清洁水的现状。我们的预测还可能会降低海水淡化技术的成本。海水淡化技术是一种从海水中获得淡水的工艺。

我们可以利用这一纳米层面的发现制造出滤膜与过滤器,为水或其它液体相关工艺和工业带来变革。比如,这一发现可以揭示化学品和药品如何穿过活细胞壁上的小通道。通过进一步研究,这些发现还可用于改进海水盐差能工艺,即通过混合淡水与海水来生产清洁能源。

没有您的慷慨参与,这些无数可能性都将无从谈起:没有研究团队拥有如此巨大的计算能力,以运行如此精密的模拟计算,从而直接比较过滤器中的实际水流状态。通过与全球网格大同盟以及参与本项目的 15 万名志愿者合作,我们才能进行前所未有的详细水流状态模拟研究,从而揭示在此前的研究中从未被发现的现象。

这一发现是我们与中国、瑞士、以色列、英国和澳大利亚研究人员共同努力的结果。由于您的参与,我们才能够在短短几年时间里完成了一台计算机需要 40,000 年才能够完成的研究。我仅代表整个团队,感谢帮助我们开展此项研究的 15 万名全球网格大同盟志愿者。这一突破性的研究成果同样也属于你们。
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#7 Re: WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

Open science: sharing our clean water breakthrough data with all scientists
By: Dr. Francois Grey
CNMM, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and Citizen Cyberscience Centre, Geneva, Switzerland
5 Aug 2015

Summary
The Computing for Clean Water team is pleased to announce that the breakthrough paper we published online last month on the use of nanotechnology for more efficient water filtration will be available in the August print edition of Nature Nanotechnology. With our results published, we're now making the underlying data available to other interested scientists and discussing the attention our work has gotten, both from international experts in the field and from the world media.



It's been a month since Nature Nanotechnology published our Computing for Clean Water paper online, detailing how water flow through carbon nanotubes can be dramatically accelerated, potentially improving access to clean water for millions of people. This week, the print edition of the journal will be published, so it's a good moment to make sure that we're sharing the benefits of our research with the wider scientific community. Today, we want to announce that we're fulfilling a commitment to open data, and we also want to share with you some of the responses our work has already gotten.

Fulfilling our promise: raw data available

The breakthrough that we describe in our paper was only possible because of the thousands of years of computing time donated by World Community Grid volunteers. As part of the World Community Grid commitment to open data access, and in accordance with the data policy of Nature, our team is making the published data, as well as underlying raw data publicly available. This opens the door to other scientists to benefit from our work for their own fields of research. There are several terabytes of raw data, so this is not something we can simply share as an email attachment. So interested parties should contact the corresponding authors.

Peer validation

Although our paper went through extensive peer review as part of the publication process, we have also gotten further validation from experts in the field. The Nature editors ask independent experts to comment on the most interesting and highest-impact papers published in Nature journals, and in one of these commentaries, world-leading physicists Lydéric Bocquet and Roland Netz speak very positively about our discovery and its potential applications. They note that our research was only possible because of "massive crowd-sourced computing power" and they state that the results of our research both "suggest a number of exciting leads for experiments" and "point to the development of mechano-fluidics in nanoscale objects as a new approach to couple nanofluidics and nanoelectromechanics."

It was very encouraging to read that independent, world-leading experts in this field believe that the research you helped power has opened a new avenue for studying water flows through nanostructures, along with potentially new ways of controlling and tuning such flows.

For more details, read the full article.

Worldwide attention

Finally, we have been overwhelmed by the incredible amount of attention this story has gotten, not only in the scientific community but on social media and in traditional media as well. Our story has garnered over 60 media hits in over 15 countries and half a dozen languages, including in China, Israel, Australia, the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Our subject might be considered quite technical, so it's wonderful to see that so many people in so many places understand the significance of our discovery and can see the link between our simulations and the development of real-world solutions to pressing problems.



On behalf of the whole team, thank you once again to all the World Community Grid volunteers who made it possible for us to do this research. As scientists, it's not every day we can say we worked with over 150,000 people around the world to get our results. It's been an inspiring and humbling experience. Each of you has contributed to the research, and we hope you share with us a sense of how groundbreaking this approach truly was, and how such research has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people
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#8 Re: WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

New Lab at Tsinghua University Created to Work on Computing for Clean Water Project Findings
By: The Computing for Clean Water team
25 Jul 2017

Summary
Dr. Ming Ma, one of the original members of the Computing for Clean Water research team, has created his own lab at Tsinghua University. Dr. Ma and his team continue to analyze the data generated by the project. Learn more about their current work and plans for the future in this update.

Background

The Computing for Clean Water project was created to provide deeper insight on the molecular scale flow of water through a novel class of filter materials. Thanks to the millions of virtual experiments that the team was able to run on World Community Grid, they discovered conditions under which water can pass through tiny carbon nanotubes much more efficiently. This groundbreaking understanding of a fundamental physical process could help improve access to clean water for millions of people through more efficient water filtration and desalination, and also may have applications in clean energy and medicine.
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The team at Tsinghua University includes (left to right) Ming Ma, Kunqi Wang, Wei Cao, and Jin Wang. Not pictured: Yao Cheng

A Growing Team

It has been one year since the main team member, Dr. Ming Ma, returned to Tsinghua University, China, after doing research at University College London and Tel Aviv University. During the past year, as an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dr. Ma recruited four new researchers as members of the team with the help from Prof. Quanshui Zheng, the leader of the Computing for Clean Water team. The new team members include one postdoc, Dr. Wei Cao; and three PhD students: Jin Wang, Kunqi Wang, and Yao Cheng.

Next Steps

The team is now working on two main tasks. The first task is to improve the algorithm used in the previous study (see the reference below) by incorporating new techniques developed during the last three years, and to implement them into LAMMPS, a molecular dynamics software. The second task is to investigate new systems with the algorithm being developed. With these tasks finished, the team wishes to bring new, interesting information into the volunteer computing community.

We thank everyone who supported Computing for Clean Water, and hope to work with you again in the near future.

Reference

M. Ma, F. Grey, L.M. Shen, M. Urbakh, S. Wu, J.Z. Liu, Y.L. Liu, Q.S. Zheng, Water transport inside carbon nanotubes mediated by phonon-induced oscillating friction, Nature Nanotech., 10 (2015) 692-695
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#9 Re: WCG Computing for Clean Water

Post by Alez »

Computing for Clean Water Results Inspire Further Study
By: The Computing for Clean Water team
22 Jan 2018

Summary
An international team of researchers was inspired by the Computing for Clean Water project to do a series of further simulations, using a slightly different model and studying the diffusion of oxygen molecules as well as water molecules. Learn about their results, which validated the work done on World Community Grid, in this article.


Background

The Computing for Clean Water project was created to provide deeper insight on the molecular scale flow of water through a novel class of filter materials. Thanks to the millions of virtual experiments that the team was able to run on World Community Grid, they discovered conditions under which water can pass through tiny carbon nanotubes much more efficiently. This groundbreaking understanding of a fundamental physical process could help improve access to clean water for millions of people through more efficient water filtration and desalination, and also may have applications in clean energy and medicine.

The Value of Independent Verification


Computing for Clean Water finished 2017 on a high note, with a follow-up pair of publications [1,2] inspired by our original Nature Nanotechnology paper [3], which used data made possible through the efforts of volunteers.

The story behind these articles illustrates an important point in science: the value of independently verifying new results. In this case, an international team with lead author Eduardo Cruz-Chú at ETH Zurich was inspired by our results to do a series of complementary simulations. The team used a somewhat different model of the water flow, and also focused on the diffusion of oxygen atoms in the water.

These authors reproduced the main finding of our article, namely the positive impact of phonons (the vibrations of the carbon nanotube atoms induced by thermal energy) on the diffusion of water in nanotubes, and the implications this has for ways to optimize such diffusion through nanotube arrays.

These authors did, however, obtain a smaller diffusion enhancement using their model than what we had reported in our study. In the field of molecular dynamics simulations, it is quite common to see some variations depending on the details of the models used. So, we did a series of further simulations to test the robustness of our original results. What we found is that the effect of phonons on the water diffusion is always large compared with a phonon-free calculation, even allowing for considerable variation in some of the parameters used in our model.

Differences between Studies

A significant difference between the two studies concerns the type of diffusion that is being monitored – we only considered water molecules, whereas our colleagues studied also the diffusion of oxygen atoms. Their results suggest that the diffusion of other molecules or ions will be different. This difference is something that we hope to study in future, since it has implications for how effective nanotubes can be in filtering out unwanted molecules and ions, for example salt ions from seawater.

While it is great to see the main insight from our World Community Grid study validated in this new study, and corroborated by our further simulations, the two new articles are also an important reminder that experimental techniques still need to be developed to study the flow of water in individual nanotubes. In the end, the ultimate arbiter of the importance of simulated results like ours will be hard experimental data. You can read our detailed response to the new article here.

In the meantime, we thank all World Community Grid participants in Computing for Clean Water for helping to obtain the original results, which are clearly getting the attention of the scientific community.

References

[1] Eduardo R. Cruz-Chú et al., Nat. Nanotech. 12, 1106–1108 (2017).

[2] Ming Ma et al., Nat. Nanotech. 12, 1108 (2015).

[3] Ming Ma et al., Nat. Nanotech. 10, 692–695 (2015).
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