Dear World Community Grid Members,

Welcome to the Computing for Clean Water project!

We really appreciate that you are willing to donate your idle computing time to this ambitious project.

Our international team is led by researchers at CNMM, a research centre focused on multidisciplinary aspects of mechanics and based at Tsinghua University in Beijing. With your help, we will be simulating novel filter materials that could help to provide cheap, clean water and even desalinate seawater.

The lack of clean drinking water is a major cause of disease and death in many parts of the developing world these days, and with the rise of global population and the erosion of the environment, this situation is getting rapidly worse. Many steps can be taken by individuals and authorities to reduce water consumption and thereby ease the pressure on demand for clean water. But ultimately, to tackle this problem requires discovering cheaper ways to filter and desalinate water. After all, nearly 97% of the world’s water lies in salty oceans and seas.

One promising route to making such filters is to use arrays of tubular carbon fibres, each only about a millionth of a millimeter in diameter. As initial experiments and simulations suggest, clean water is unusually easy to extract through such filters. Reducing the pressure needed to force water through filters has a direct impact on the cost of any filtration process, and it is this opportunity that our research will seek to optimize. But to understand the optimal conditions for such filtration, we will require millions of simulations under a very wide range of conditions. This is where your computer will play a key role.

We are really looking forward to seeing the results of this project, and sharing the insights we get from it with you. Although what we are doing is quite fundamental science, it can have a significant long-term impact on practical applications, guiding other researchers around the world to develop better filter solutions. As the project moves forward, we will be certain to keep you updated about our findings and publications in this forum. You can also visit the website of CNMM for more information about us: http://cnmm.tsinghua.edu.cn




亲爱的World Community Grid用户，

欢迎参加“清水计算"项目！

我们非常感谢您愿为这项庞大的项目捐赠您的闲置计算时间。

我们的国际团队由CNMM的研究者领衔。CNMM位于北京，是清华大学直属的一个以力学和多学科交叉创新为宗旨的研究中心。在你们的帮助下，我们将进行新型过滤材料的模拟研究，以更加经济的方式提供清洁的淡水，例
如采用海水淡化。

现今，清洁饮用水的缺乏是引起疾病和死亡的主要原因之一，对于发展中国家尤其如此。全球人口的增长和环境的侵蚀加剧了这种情况的恶化。虽然人们可以采取许多方法以减少水的消耗，从而减轻对清洁水的需求压力，但是，
要从根本上解决这个问题，仍依赖于采取更经济的方式来过滤和淡化海水。毕竟，世界上近97％的水储存在海洋中。

为了达到这个目标，一个有希望的途径是采用纳米碳管阵列作为过滤器来进行海水淡化。已有实验和仿真结果表明，采用这种过滤器，人们可以用比现阶段低得多的压力制备出洁净的淡水。而过滤盐水所需压力的降低，对于减少
淡水制备的能耗及成本有直接的作用，这也正是我们研究工作的出发点。但为了获得过滤的最佳条件，我们需要数百万个模拟来对大量关键参数进行研究，这也正是您的计算机将发挥重要作用的地方。

我们非常期待看到这个项目的成果，并与您分享我们从中得到的知识。虽然我们目前所做的是很基础的科学研究，但是它对实际应用有长期的、重要的影响，并将引导世界其他各地的研究人员来开发更好的过滤方案。随着项目的
不断推进，我们会持续在本论坛中更新我们的研究结果和文章发表，以使您在第一时间能够了解到项目的进展情况。您也可以访问CNMM的网站: http://cnmm.tsinghua.edu.cn 以获得更多关于我们的资料。

Professor Quanshui Zheng