Picture: University of Manchester)

Scientists have created a graphene-based sieve capable of making seawater drinkable.

The development by UK-based researchers brings closer the prospect of providing clean water to millions of people who struggle to gain access.

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The team at the University of Manchester, where colleagues won a Nobel Prize in 2010 for first extracting graphene, have managed to precisely control the sizes of pores in a graphene oxide sieve.

The discovery allows them to filter out salts from water to make it safe to drink, they announced in the journal Nature Nanotechnology yesterday.


With man-made climate change reducing cities’ water supplies, countries have been increasingly investing in ‘desalination’ technologies.

The device could make seawater drinkable (Picture: Getty)

The UN has predicted that around 1.2 billion people, or 14 per cent of the world’s population, will experience difficulties sourcing clean water by 2025.



Professor Rahul Nair, who led the team of researchers in Manchester, said it is a ‘significant step forward’ that will ‘open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology’.

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He said: ‘Realisation of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology.

‘This is the first clear-cut experiment in this regime. We also demonstrate that there are realistic possibilities to scale up the described approach and mass produce graphene-based membranes with required sieve sizes.’

Mr Jijo Abraham, joint lead author of the paper along with Dr Vasu Siddeswara Kalangi, said: ‘The developed membranes are not only useful for desalination, but the atomic scale tunability of the pore size also opens new opportunity to fabricate membranes with on-demand filtration capable of filtering out ions according to their sizes.’