Salts in Hot Water: Developing a Scientific Basis for Supercritical Desalination and Strategic Metal Recovery
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Tulane Univ., New Orleans, LA (United States)
Given the steady growth in world population and the ever-increasing fresh water demand, the only sustainable water supply option is desalination. Conceptually, desalination is very simple - just separate dissolved salts from water. While desalination research programs have existed since the 1960s and have resulted in a multitude of approaches, realizing affordable desalination has proven to be a challenge. Our goal is to meet this challenge using low cost heat sources to drive a liquid-discharge-free desalination process that can be co-mingled with the extraction of economically valuable co-products. High temperatures and pressures will be used to manipulate water’s properties, such as the dielectric constant, and hence its ability to solvate ions. Selective precipitation/recovery of valuable metal co-products creates new revenue streams (i.e., cost offsets). We will develop the scientific understanding necessary to control salt precipitation from supercritical seawater, inland brines, and water commonly co-produced with oil and gas. Atomistic simulations will be used to understand at a molecular level the changes in hydrogen bonding and ion solvation that occur as we increase the temperature and/or pressure and change the density and ion concentration. Our simulation results will also aid in the interpretation of experimental data and guide the development of applied thermodynamic models for engineering design calculations.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL); Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
- DOE Contract Number:
- 89233218CNA000001
- OSTI ID:
- 1659155
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR--20-26967
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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