Getting to the bottom of things

"There's plenty of room at the bottom" was the famous quip by Richard Feynman, a brilliant American physicist, describing the technological possibilities that he foresaw, already in 1959, for the field we today call nanotechnology. But once you get to the bottom, the nanoworld is often a strange and mysterious place.

Here at the Computing for Clean Water project, researchers in China, Australia and the UK have been struggling for several months to make sense of all the amazing data that you volunteers have simulated for us over the last couple of years. As we've alluded to in our last post, there's definitely something exciting that we're seeing in the data, concerning an unexpected oscillation in the flow of the water through the nanotube.

Getting to the bottom of what this is, though, has involved quite a lot of detective work. Shuai Wu, a Ph.D. student at Tsinghua University and Ming Ma – previously with Tsinghua and now doing a postdoc at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, have been the chief detectives. The rest of us, spread over three continents, have been chiming in with comments and suggestions during regular teleconferences.

We're not quite done analyzing everything, but we're at a stage now where we feel we have a pretty good idea of what is going on. And if we're right, it's an effect that has been overlooked in previous research, simply because researchers have had nowhere near enough computing power to do the sort of detailed high-resolution studies of the flow that we have done thanks to C4CW.

What does this mean for water filtration? Well if the effect we've observed can be tuned properly to the liquid flow, it may be possible to reduce the resistance of the tube to water flowing through it. This would mean less energy needed to filter water, which is a good thing. Exactly how we could exploit this effect is something we are discussing and debating a lot about these days. And if we come up with a good plan for how to do this, we may again ask for your help to simulate whether this will work in practice.

However, our first priority is to finalize the analysis and publish the results, so that our colleagues in labs around the world can also start thinking about how this surprising effect might be used for practical purposes. As soon as we're further along with that process, we'll be sure to get back to you and share more about our analysis. Once a manuscript we are working on gets through the usual process of peer review, we'll share that with you, too. Even before then, we hope to be able to share some animations that capture the main idea of this effect, which we're working on.

In the meantime, on behalf of the whole team, we extend our grateful thanks to all you volunteers who contributed to Computing for Clean Water. Your combined computing power was like turning on a giant microscope. Suddenly we saw right to the bottom. There's plenty of room there. And also plenty of surprises!

The C4CW Team