Development of Flow-Pattern Manipulator for Membraneless Seawater Desalination
Over 700 million people in 43 countries are experiencing water scarcity. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in places with severe water scarcity and two-thirds of the global population will encounter some degree of water stress. If warming continues at the current pace, by 2030 half of the world’s population will experience severe water stress. The development of innovative and capable technologies to (i) relieve the severe water stress people have already experienced, and (ii) minimize the impact of energy-inefficient processes that deteriorate the already-fragile environment, will, therefore, be extremely desirable. In response to the need for Technical Transfer Opportunities requested by the Department of Energy (DoE), ThermoFlow Labs (TFL) and its team members: The University of Texas at Austin (UT), the University of Missouri – Columbia (MU), and Teledyne Scientific Company (Teledyne) proposed a microfluidic manipulator that can be seamlessly implemented into a membraneless EMD device, and readily double its current salt rejection rate of 25% to 50% by the end of Phase I, and realize a portable system capable of generating 5-10 gallons per day with > 99% salt rejection rate in three years. Our flow manipulator has been proved to perform the desalination rate of 83.9% in a single Y-shaped device under the same current density used in the benchmark case through computational simulation. Such desalination rate (83.9%) in a single cell can greatly minimize the consumption of building material: only three serial-connected cells are needed to yield 99% desalination rate (12.5% recovery rate), compared with seventeen serial-connected cells, with desalination rate of 25%, are needed. From our current simulation, it is found that the flow velocity is a more significant factor influencing the desalination process than the flow rotation caused by the designed structure; however, that is based on an assumption of constant current density at the anode. To validate this numerical discovery, obtaining the actual current density measured through experimentation will be useful, and should be used as the input for the next step of numerical simulation, thus more convincing results would be obtained. Two pilot versions of devices have been fabricated and tested. We plan to characterize the influence of the manipulator on the formation of the electric field gradient local to the anode by direct electric field measurements in the following phases. We will seek to corroborate experimental findings by numerical simulation. These results will provide an in-depth understanding of the influence of the system design on the electric field gradient.
- Research Organization:
- ThermoFlow Labs, LLC
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
- Contributing Organization:
- ThermoFlow Labs, LLC
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0018465
- OSTI ID:
- 1491409
- Type / Phase:
- STTR (Phase I)
- Report Number(s):
- DE-SC0018465
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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