The paper: [1]

They're still at lab scale in glass. They haven't built a usable system, even a small one. The big claim here is that it doesn't clog; capillary action moves the salt out of the active area to another area, where some yet to be developed mechanism removes it. That needs to be demonstrated. If they can come up with something that runs for years without clogging or replacing the active material, that's a real advance.

Laser surface preparation is known.[2] It's useful for roughening smooth surfaces in a very structured way, in preparation for painting. The result is a smooth paint surface. If you sandblast to roughen, the first paint layer is somewhat irregular. Then you need to sand and paint again to get a smooth surface. Laser roughening has been tried for auto painting, but didn't go mainstream. A good question here is whether commercial laser surface prep systems can make the material this new process uses.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-026-02315-4

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKYOglHYo_Y

▲

Nifty3929 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It reminds me of how the Panama canal was built, and actually the first major attempt failed and they gave up. What they learned for the second attempt was that digging was not the hard(est) part to solve - it was how to move the dirt! So much dirt!

Great book on this BTW: Path Between the Seas. I couldn't put it down.

	▲	Animats 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's a common problem in surface treatments, sometimes called "nanotechnology". There are super hydrophobic surface treatments that are very effective. They generate a surface which is a forest of tiny sharp points. The surface tension of water is too high to cling to such a surface. You can make something that just will not get wet. The problem is that the points are fragile, and wear destroys the effect. Another example is ultra black coatings. Those are a forest of tiny black objects arranged so that light gets reflected multiple times and is absorbed. The commercial version is called "Vantablack". It doesn't wear well, but for optical applications such as the insides of camera lenses and telescopes, that's fine.

▲

jmward01 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is an interesting tech, but I have big doubts. In the picture you can see some salt coating the surface. Even just a little seems like too much for this type of system. I really hope they can make this work and scale this up.