## 4 Conclusions  
A novel desalination procedure has been presented in this work, consisting of an array of cells that can function in parallel, based on simulation data derived from molecular dynamics simulations. The investigation has been based on nanoscale simulations to extract each cell property and project the findings on a wider scale.  
Each cell comprises a nanochannel filled with water/ion solution. A perpendicular to the walls electric field is applied to drive ions towards the walls, while an external force with direction parallel to the walls is applied to induce flow. Clean water is gathered at the outlet. Nanoscale surface effects are expected to affect water/ion properties inside the cell. In terms of shear viscosity, calculations have shown that there exists increased shear viscosity perpendicular to the wall, which decreases monotonically as the strength of the external electric field \(E\) increases from \(E\) = 0.0 to 1.0 V/A. On the other hand, the shear viscosity component parallel to the flow direction remains unaffected. Wall hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity does not seem to affect shear viscosity significantly, at least at the range investigated here.  
Moreover, calculations on the volumetric flow rate per unit length for each cell has revealed a monotonic, decreasing effect behavior as the walls turn from hydrophobic to hydrophilic. This effect is more pronounced in the smaller cell dimensions studied, for \(h\) = 3 nm. However, for every cell dimension shown here, the flow rate obtains its maximum value for the strongly hydrophobic channel.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \(N\) & \(h\) & \(L_{z}\)(cm) & \(L_{x}\)(cm) & \(q\) (lt/day) \\ \hline
395,257 & 2.53 \(\times 10^{-6}\) & 1 & 7.33 \(\times 10^{-4}\) & 1.54 \(\times 10^{-7}\) \\ \hline
293,255 & 3.41 \(\times 10^{-6}\) & 1 & 9.89 \(\times 10^{-4}\) & 2.79 \(\times 10^{-7}\) \\ \hline
227,273 & 4.40 \(\times 10^{-6}\) & 1 & 1.28 \(\times 10^{-3}\) & 4.66 \(\times 10^{-7}\) \\ \hline
180,733 & 5.53 \(\times 10^{-6}\) & 1 & 1.61 \(\times 10^{-3}\) & 7.37 \(\times 10^{-7}\) \\ \hline
80,000 & 1.25 \(\times 10^{-5}\) & 1 & 3.63 \(\times 10^{-3}\) & 3.76 \(\times 10^{-6}\) \\ \hline
800 & 1.25 \(\times 10^{-4}\) & 1 & 3.64 \(\times 10^{-2}\) & 3.76 \(\times 10^{-4}\) \\ \hline
800 & 1.25 \(\times 10^{-3}\) & 1 & 3.64 \(\times 10^{-1}\) & 3.76 \(\times 10^{-2}\) \\ \hline
80 & 1.25 \(\times 10^{-2}\) & 1 & 3.64 & 3.76 \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Calculated volumetric flow rate per unit length, for various cases of cell heights and number of cells incorporated in a device.  
By establishing a parallel array of cells investigated in this work, it is possible to achieve practical water desalination rates, without the need to experiment on expensive membrane materials and/or electrodes. Some indicative cases have been tabulated and we believe that this will assist on establishing a practical desalination device in the future.  
This research received no external funding.  
Not applicable.  
Data Availability Statement: Data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.  
This work was partially supported by computational time granted from the National Infrastructures for Research and Technology S.A. (GRNET S.A.) in the National HPC facility--ARIS--under project ID PR011044/ULTRAS_ML.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.