I happen to be an amateur chemist of sorts (my beowulf interest stemming from analytical chemistry). I totally missed the first post. In regards to separation, I'm fairly certain dioxane dissolves sugar (easily made from dehydrating ethylene glycol in antifreeze). Since it doesn't dissolve salt, you could perform an extraction from the water solution, as long as there was a high enough percentage of salt in the water to keep the dioxane from dissolving in it.<div><br></div>This is now highly off-topic, but I've always wanted to have an email list for chemistry, something like Usenet, better than a forum, and with a more close community than a forum; what software does this board use? Perhaps there are some members interested in chemistry...? <span></span><div><br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Nathan<br><div><div><br>On Friday, March 11, 2016, Lux, Jim (337C) <<a href="mailto:james.p.lux@jpl.nasa.gov">james.p.lux@jpl.nasa.gov</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Salt will react with some things that sugar will not react with: Dissolved salt is sodium ions and chloride ions, while sugar remains a nice intact molecule. So you get your molecular sieve (filtering does work, you just need a finer filter).<br>
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If you could find something that reacts with salt to produce an insoluble precipitate, that would work. Sodium salts, though are notoriously soluble, as are chloride salts.<br>
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Or, you electrolyze the mixture: the chlorine comes off as a gas, the sodium turns into sodium hydroxide (hydrogen comes off the other electrode): the sugar just stays there. Now you have a mixture of sodium hydroxide and sugar, and maybe that's more easily separable.<br>
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Or, you use the fact that they crystalize out of solution at different concentrations.. you evaporate it in a thin dish, and the resulting solids will be partially separated.<br>
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Or you use differential freezing (same as evaporating, really)<br>
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If you don't need to actually recover the sugar, you could heat it up until the salt melts: the sugar will decompose and leave carbon behind, bubble oxygen through the molten mixture and the C will get burned off as CO2.<br>
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And, then, there's another approach: add yeast to the solution, which will digest the sugar making alcohol. And wouldn't you really rather have alcohol with salt? Add lime juice and you're all set.<br>
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<br>
Jim<br>
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-----Original Message-----<br>
From: John Hearns [mailto:<a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'John.Hearns@xma.co.uk')">John.Hearns@xma.co.uk</a>]<br>
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2016 7:59 AM<br>
To: 'C Bergström' <<a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'cbergstrom@pathscale.com')">cbergstrom@pathscale.com</a>>; Justin Y. Shi <<a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'shi@temple.edu')">shi@temple.edu</a>><br>
Cc: Lux, Jim (337C) <<a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'james.p.lux@jpl.nasa.gov')">james.p.lux@jpl.nasa.gov</a>>; <a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'beowulf@beowulf.org')">beowulf@beowulf.org</a><br>
Subject: RE: [Beowulf] [OT] MPI-haters<br>
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> - either magically inside the compiler and or explicitly via source<br>
> syntax sugar.. However, resolving them is only half the battle<br>
> - keep it all high performance is the other half. (reducing data<br>
> movement/locality) so lets not mistake salt for sugar..<br>
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<br>
Disclaimer - I am not a chemist.<br>
How WOULD one separate salt from sugar? Let's have some inventive ideas.<br>
Forgive me of this is in Chemistry 101 and is an easy undergraduate problem.<br>
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Both are water soluble, so there is no point in dissolving one and filtering out the solid part.<br>
Is there a solute which acts on sugar but not on salt (let's say common table salt and sucrose crystals for arguments sake).<br>
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Or do we ned a sophisticated Rube Goldberg machine which sends drops a stream of single crystals through a laser scanner which is then followed by an ultrafast air-blast kicker to sort the crystals into separate hoppers.<br>
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</blockquote></div></div></div><br><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr">--Nathan Pimental, <br>--Peppertree Labs (<a href="http://ptp.x10.mx" target="_blank">http://ptp.x10.mx</a>)<br><div><br></div></div><br>