VOA常速英语2016--新型滤水技术或能带来价格合理清洁饮用水（在线收听）

新型滤水技术或能带来价格合理清洁饮用水

Developing the perfect water filter is Baoxia Mi's goal. Growing up in China, she learned the value of clean drinking water early on. Now at the University of California, Berkeley, the environmental engineer is developing a new type of membrane that could be more efficient than today's water filtration technology and consume less energy in the process.

发明一个完美的滤水装置是米宝霞博士一直以来的梦想。自小在中国长大的她很早就知晓清洁饮用水的重要性。而现在在加州大学伯克利分校，这位环境工程师正在研发一种比当今的滤水技术更加高效节能的新型滤膜。

It's made up of layers of graphene, 100,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair.

它是由多层石墨烯构成，甚至比人类的一缕发丝还要薄10万倍。

“We made it from graphite, which is a material that we use in pencils for example, so it's cheap and relatively abundant. So we can use that, and the process that we use to make from the graphite to the graphene oxide is actually quite scalable.”

“我们以石墨为原料，这种材料平常用于制作铅笔，因此价格低廉而且资源丰富。这样我们就可以使用这种材料，而我们将石墨制成石墨烯氧化物的过程是可以进行延展的。”

That means the membranes could be adapted to filter water from a faucet, as well as for large systems used to treat wastewater. The membranes are much like a maze for water molecules. The water passes through a series of layers separated by spaces specifically designed to remove different types of contaminants.

这代表着这种滤膜膜既可以用来过滤水龙头的流水，也可以应用于大型废水处理系统。在这种滤膜中，水分子就像进了迷宫一样。水会流经一层层专门设计用于过滤去除不同污染物的单独空间。

“In order to kind of get a different…remove different targeted molecules, the most direct way of thinking about it is to control the spacing that we have between the layers.”

“为了得到不同的…因此需要过滤掉不同的目标分子，而最直接的方法就是控制每个过滤层间的空间。”

The researchers are working on further improvements, they hope their work will contribute to finding solutions to water purification worldwide to make clean water affordable and available for people everywhere.

研究人员正致力于进一步的改善工作，他们希望这项研究可以解决全球面临的水净化问题，为人们提供负担得起的清洁饮用水。