New water desalination method

Desalination is hardly a new idea, but the current methods
such as reverse osmosis (RO) and flash distillation are
energy intensive and require extensive infrastructure, thus
making them expensive. While investigating a new carbon
aerogel for using it as capacitors for energy storage, Michael
Stadermann and Ted Baumann at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL), United States, realised that it
was promising for capacitive water desalination.
Aerogels, a special class of ultralow-density materials, have
a complicated, cross-linked internal structure that gives
them the highest internal surface area per gram of any
known material.