[Physics] How thin a filter to filter particles out of salt water to make salt for human consumption

biophysicsphysical-chemistryporous-mediawater

I have gathered some salt in the Death Valley and for the fun of it I would like to clean it and make it edible. The process I plan to follow is simple:

  1. Dissolve the salt in water.

  2. Boil water for 30 min to kill bacteria.

  3. Filter water to remove foreign particles.

  4. Evaporate water to get clean salt.

At step 3, I'm planning to buy paper filters with pores of 3 µm to filter fine particles. Is it sufficient for the purpose of human consumption?

I'm mostly wondering if there is a key pore size threshold beyond which it is significantly less useful to filter, or if it's just a matter of degree, the smaller the better at an consistent size/benefit ratio.

Best Answer

There are 3 kinds of mixtures in liquid...

  1. True Solution
  2. Colloids
  3. Suspension

These three vary in between because of the size of the particle in them. see wiki. Now, the salt solution you were talking about comes under category "true solution" i.e. particle size less than 1 $nm$.

Now we don't have sieve to filter out this particles of this dimension. Even bacterias and microbes are orders of magnitude greater than this dimension.

As per classical textbooks, it's only suspension that can be filtered out using sieve or sedimentation. Even for colloids one needs ultrafiltration methods, with superfine pores in the filter.