Another Lesson from Plants: The Forward Osmosis-Based Actuator

Another Lesson from Plants: The Forward Osmosis-Based Actuator

Osmotic actuation is a ubiquitous plant-inspired actuation strategy that has a very low power consumption but is capable of generating effective movements in a wide variety of environmental conditions. In light of these features, we aimed to develop a novel, low-power-consumption actuator that is capable of generating suitable forces during a characteristic actuation time on the order of a few ...

Another Important Lesson from Military Surgery?

Knowingwhen awound can safely be closed is an iconic problem for surgery. When an extremity wound is closed too soon, with resulting infection requiring further debridement, an amputation can result. Or a minor amputation can be converted into a major amputation. Patient welfare is on the line, and expenses are considerable in these situations. The novel work (Forsberg et al. 2015), published i...

Forward Osmosis Brine Drying

The Forward Osmosis Brine Drying (FOBD) system is based on a technique called forward osmosis (FO). FO is a membrane-based process where the osmotic potential between brine and a salt solution is equalized by the movement of water from the brine to the salt solution. The FOBD system is composed of two main elements, the FO bag and the salt regeneration system. This paper discusses the results o...

Action at a distance: another lesson from the red cell.

Forward Osmosis as a Pre-treatment to Reverse Osmosis

This paper presents some aspects of forward osmosis coupled with reverse osmosis using a recirculating draw solution, to produce desalinated water or for dewatering/concentrating a feed stream, with some data provided from a number of operational sites. Many of these aspects are applicable to other osmotic processes and provide an insight into where they may be appropriately considered. A compa...