New water treatment technology may recycle even water with high salinity.
Researchers found that a theoretical design could be the most cost-effective way to turn salt water into clean drinking water.
Climate change is causing significant droughts in the southwestern United States, setting a worrying record. Lake Mead, which supplies water to millions of people, is near an all-time low. And in some places, the shrinking Colorado River, which irrigates 12 million acres of farmland and quenches the thirst of more than 40 million people, is all desert and dust.
Meanwhile, in 2018, about 80% of domestic wastewater, including water used in agriculture, power plants, and mines, was discharged into the world untreated and unusable, a missed opportunity. It will be. Today’s purification technology, using reverse osmosis, is still the most cost-effective and energy-efficient way to treat seawater and salty groundwater. Still, conventional reverse osmosis doubles the salinity of the sea. I can’t handle super salt. With the U.S. water supply dwindling (and becoming salty), the country can no longer afford to dump even saltwater springs into the world.
In a new study, now published in the journal Desalination, members of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) research consortium analyzed a new form of reverse osmosis called low-salt removal reverse osmosis. These new systems can also treat water with high salinity. However, the design is so unique that it is still in the theoretical stage.
The NAWI research team used supercomputers to analyze over 130,000 potential system design costs, water production, and energy costs to find out how these technologies compete with other water treatment options. We have developed a mathematical model that allows rapid assessment of consumption. Their results show that low-salt removal rate reverse osmosis is often the most cost-effective option, reducing the total cost of water supply production by up to 63%.
“The ultimate goal of this study is to conduct a thorough techno-economic evaluation of new technologies that have not yet been tested in the real world but have the potential to enable desalination with high water recovery.” said senior engineer Adam Attiah. He belongs to the National Institute of Energy Technology and is the paper's principal author.
Several studies have investigated the potential cost and efficiency of low-salt removal reverse osmosis systems, but this study provides a more comprehensive analysis of their design, operation, and performance. To better understand the potential of these theoretical systems, the team used supercomputers to find the most optimal and cost-effective designs. We then investigated how these designs performed in hundreds of thousands (rather than just a handful) of scenarios. A reverse osmosis system with a low salt rejection rate allows more salt to pass through each membrane, thus requiring less force, or energy, to push the water out. But even with more salt infiltration, the resulting water is still too salty to drink. To produce potable water, this water is still too salty and is returned to the previous membrane stage. Once the salinity is low enough, conventional reverse osmosis membranes can produce high-quality drinking water.
All this recycling adds complexity to the system. Therefore, the team had to ensure that:
How many membrane stages are optimal? How many recycling loops are required? And how much cost and energy will these loops generate? We could independently calculate how much clean water each design could produce from the water of different salinity.
All this recycling adds more complexity to the system. So the team had to solve the following:
How many membrane stages are optimal? How many recycling loops are required? And how much cost and energy are generated by these loops? We could independently calculate how much clean water each design could produce from the water of different salinity. “The resolution could take a very, very, very long time,” said Ethan Young, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and study author. Stated. “Thanks to high-performance computing, we could do this in minutes.”
And in those few minutes, they considered not just his one but hundreds of thousands of potential scenarios.
“What is new in our study is the computational power we bring to this analysis,” added NREL researcher and author Bernard (Ben) Knuven.
Young says these calculations would take about 88 days instead of an hour or even minutes without a supercomputer. Of course, supercomputers also needed the mathematical magic of Knuven and Young to solve these complex design problems quickly and accurately. With these quick calculations, the research team found that low-salinity reverse osmosis outperformed its competitors in cost and energy usage, at least for waters with a salt content of less than 125 grams per liter. I decided it was possible. But the team’s model could also help other research teams identify, build, and test the most promising system designs.
“The hope is that through such computational analysis, we can provide experimenters with information to say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting to study,’ or ‘No, that’s probably completely out of the question,’” Knuven said. rice field.
This model can also be extended to allow experimenters to find optimal designs for reverse osmosis systems. Their study is the first to leverage and complement NAWI’s Techno-Economic Assessment Platform (WaterTAP) for water treatment. WaterTAP is a publicly available software tool that allows users to model and simulate various water treatment technologies to evaluate cost, energy, and environmental trade-offs.
“I think it’s pretty cool. We’re developing tools to help us and other researchers evaluate the potential of new and exciting technologies,” he said. rice field. The tool was developed as a collaboration between NREL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory at Oak Ridge. National Institutes and the University of California Regents.
Next, the researchers hope to work with experimental teams to develop and evaluate how a low-salt-removal reverse osmosis system works in the real world. For example, mineral accumulation can slow down the system and should be considered in future evaluations. Still, Attia says this new form of reverse osmosis could be a valuable tool for maximizing water recovery from high-salinity sources. “And our model can play an important role in supporting the deployment of the technology,” he said.
“For me, it shows what can be achieved with a little math and tweaking,” said Knuven.
Who we are?
AquaML is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning platform for sustainable water solutions. It is an end-to-end platform that enables Water utility companies, municipalities, and manufacturing units to predict, perform and operate water solutions with improved efficiency. Be it energy reduction, reduction in Green House Gases like Nitrogen and CO2, predictive Maintenance, optimization of chemical dosing, and much more, our pre-trained models help you provide insights.
- If you find it interesting, you can check out our “Dare to Challenge Us” Campaign, and please visit our website aquaml.io for more information.
- If you have any Feedback, Thoughts, or Questions — Write to us @ info@aquaml.io
Do clap and share this if you found it interesting and insightful, and do follow us for more such articles.
