University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers have developed a new electrode design for battery-based seawater desalination, which could potentially lead to more efficient and energy-saving desalination processes.
According to a university press release, engineers have found a way to eliminate "dead zones" — stagnant areas where fluid doesn't flow properly — in the electrodes used in battery-based desalination. The new design incorporates a tapered channel within the electrodes, which improves fluid flow and could reduce energy consumption compared to traditional reverse osmosis methods.
While scientists have made impressive strides in desalination technologies, and thousands of plants are already operating worldwide — such as on the island of Curaçao, which relies on the process — the researchers said that large-scale desalination has been difficult to achieve for several reasons.
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Never 👎 The most common technique, reverse osmosis, uses pressure to push seawater through a semipermeable membrane and remove the salt. This process has a high energy demand, which drives up electricity and operating costs. In comparison, battery-based desalination uses electricity to remove salt ions from seawater directly.
While the latter method requires significantly less energy than reverse osmosis, the research team said it still needs a fair amount of energy to push fluids through the electrodes. But, the new and improved technique could pave the way to cheaper and less energy-intensive desalination.
Kyle Smith, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mechanical science and engineering professor and lead author of the study, said: "However, by creating channels within the electrodes, the technique could require less energy to push the water through and eventually become more efficient than what is commonly used in the reverse-osmosis process."
The Illinois researchers have been fine-tuning the battery-based desalination process for years and recently performed a successful experiment using electrodes equipped with small channels called interdigitated flow fields. These microchannels help maximize flow uniformity in the electrodes, eliminating dead zones and enhancing permeability by over 100 times, according to the study published in the journal Electrochimica Acta.
The research group added that incorporating tapered channels instead of straight ones also led to a two- to threefold improvement in fluid flow.
While Smith and his colleague, Illinois graduate student Habib Rahman, said they had some manufacturing hurdles to overcome in creating the channels in the electrodes, they believe this can be optimized for scaled-up production. The technology can also be used in other applications, bringing us closer to a sustainable future where everyone can access clean, cheap drinking water.
Smith said, "Beyond its impact toward electrochemical desalination, our channel-tapering theory and associated design principles can be applied directly to any other electrochemical device that uses flowing fluids, including those for energy storage conversion and environmental sustainability like fuel cells, electrolysis cells, flow batteries, carbon capture devices and lithium recovery devices."
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