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Engineers Overcome Key Hurdle in Seawater Desalination with New Electrode Design

Engineers have developed an innovative solution to eliminate “dead zones” in electrodes used for battery-based seawater desalination. The breakthrough utilizes a tapered flow channel design within the electrodes, which facilitates faster, more efficient fluid movement, potentially reducing energy consumption compared to traditional reverse osmosis techniques.

Currently, reverse osmosis is the most common desalination method, which involves pushing water through a membrane to filter out salt. While effective, reverse osmosis is energy-intensive and costly. In contrast, the new battery-based technique uses electricity to draw charged salt ions out of seawater, but previously required energy to push water through electrodes with tiny, uneven pore spaces.

Professor Kyle Smith, a mechanical science and engineering expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, led the study and explained that traditional electrodes lacked structured flow channels, which made fluid movement inefficient. The new technique, however, creates structured channels within the electrodes, reducing energy usage and improving efficiency compared to reverse osmosis.

The research team’s innovative electrodes use interdigitated flow fields (IDFFs), with tapered channels that boost fluid flow and permeability by two to three times compared to straight channels. This design improvement is detailed in a recent study published in the journal Electrochimica Acta.

The research group, led by graduate student Habib Rahman, initially explored straight channels but encountered issues with pressure drops and uneven flow. By experimenting with 28 different straight channels, they successfully applied tapered designs to overcome these challenges.

Although the manufacturing process for the tapered channels poses scalability issues, the team is confident that these hurdles can be overcome. The new design principles may also benefit other electrochemical devices, including energy storage, fuel cells, lithium recovery, and carbon capture technologies.

This new approach provides a physics-based solution to improve uniform flow and reduce pressure drops, potentially revolutionizing desalination and other applications involving flowing fluids.

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