how would you separate pure water from sea water?

Answer 1

Distillation, as the previous poster mentioned.

You can use reverse osmosis (RO)...that's cheaper than distillation, and it pulls out water from the salts...but some non-ionic contaminants can still remain.

Check out www.millipore.com for more info on RO

Answer 2

Sea water is simply water located in one or more seas around the world. Sea water contains pure water plus a whole lot more.

Pure water is simply H2O and nothing else mixed into the liquid, solid, or gaseous state of water. So separating pure water from sea water means to extract H2O from one or more seas without extracting all the other stuff that might be in the sea water. The tricky part of this extraction is that sea water contains a heck of a lot more stuff other than H2O and NaCl (table salt).

The good news is that mother nature provides evaporation. When sea water evaporates, it rises into the air to become clouds under the right conditions. And, again under the right conditions, the clouds give us rain, sleet, snow, or hail, which are composed mostly, but not entirely, of pure water.

Distillation, which is a form of evaporation often done in laboratories, can be used to extract largely pure water from sea water. Most minerals, including table salt, will be left behind. Morton Salt, which you can buy in a grocery store, used to have salt flats in the San Francisco Bay. These pools of bay water took advantage of evaporation that left behind deposits of NaCl in the flats. In this case, they extracted the salt from sea water rather than pure water from sea water; but they used the same means for extraction...evaporation.

There are also other means for extracting pure water from sea water. Osmosis is a physical (pressure) process that can transfer pure water through a membrane into sea water, thereby diluting the sea water. This is the reverse of what you want to do; so, along comes reverse osmosis, which can cause sea water to cross over into the pure water side of a membrane. In fact, recent advances in reverse osmosis are being put to use by commercial plants that desalinate sea water for drinking, cooking, etc.

Chemicals can be used to combine with salt in sea water; so that the salt is extracted. Filters, like the one in an ordinary coffee maker, can be used to extract particulates like sand, small plants, and such. To a greater or lesser extent, your water company uses all these means to purify the water you drink, even if it does not come from the sea.

Answer 3

Hi. Distillation works, of course, but it requires far less energy to freeze water and remove the slush. If you melt the slush by pre-chilling the incoming seawater it can be even more energy efficient. The water could be used for drinking and bathing, but if you were looking for DISTILLED water then your answer is self evident.

Answer 4

u can use simple distillation to obtain pure water form sea water or even tap water

Answer 5

Distillation

Answer 6

it cannot be done. once the two combine they become a solution. it is however, possible to identify all the elements in the solution. if you consider 'pure water' to be only hydrogen and oxygen then all that is left other than those two elements is from sea water.

Answer 7

There are machines doing this. by using the evaporation point difference. Ships use a machine called EVA (evaporator) and they make their own drinking water from seawater.

Answer 8

You can run the salt water through some cheese cloth and catch all the salt, use it at the table with your meal.Nah run it through a condenser

Answer 9

Evaporation,due to different fusion points

Answer 10

evaporate it and collect the steam

a condenser can do this