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(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that carbon nanotube membrane pores could enable ultra-rapid dialysis processes that would greatly reduce treatment time for hemodialysis patients. The researchers found that carbon nanotube pores might provide a solution to the permeability vs. selectivity tradeoff, which is well-known for synthetic membranes. When using a concentration gradient as a driving force, small ions were found to diffuse through these tiny pores more than an order of magnitude faster than when moving in bulk solution.
