Desalination and Advanced Water Purification
Eric M.V. Hoek, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCLA, with UCLA graduate student, Greg Guillen
Supplying the world with fresh and potable water in a sustainable manner represents one of the great challenges of the 21st century. The KAUST — Cornell Center for Energy and Sustainability is addressing this challenge through research into advanced membrane materials. Specifically, we are investigating new membrane designs based on nanoscale hybrid materials and novel polymeric building blocks for advanced water filtration and desalination. Our explicit goals are to design membranes with the following features:
- Higher permeate fluxes/filtration rates
- Enhanced resistance to fouling and scaling
- Improved physical and chemical stability
- High-resolution solute selectivity
- Lower materials and energy costs
- Self-Cleaning capabilities
We anticipate that these improvements will impact all aspects of desalination and advanced water purification technologies. Work in the center focuses on evaluating these effects in multiple settings.
- New forward and reverse osmosis membranes
- Desalination of ocean and brackish water
- Advanced purification of tertiary effluents for indirect potable reuse
- Salinity gradient energy production and energy recovery
- Osmotic membrane bioreactors
- Remote water samplers
- New ultrafiltration and nanofiltration membranes
- Fresh water filtration and FO/RO feedwater pretreatment
- Hardness, metals, and organic removal from surface and ground waters
- Municipal and produced water filtration for nonpotable reuse
- Water quality analyitical separations
The scope and integration for this research thrust is to research NIMs and polymers, the selection and creation of nano-scale building blocks, the formation and characterization of NIMs-based membranes, and the application and testing of NIMs-based membranes as they apply to water desalination and purification.
Examples of integrated research.
- Osmotic membranes (Elimelech, Hoek, Giannellis, Gruner)
- Filtration membranes (Hoek, Wiesner, Escobedo, Gruner, Giannellis)
- Fouling resistance (Ober, Elimelech, Hoek)
