Reverse osmosis membrane (RO) is becoming a most popular instrument to desalinate seawater as a result of new developments in membrane technology. The critical factor governing successful long-term reverse osmosis (RO) in desalination plants is fouling caused by the turbidity of seawater, such as by suspended solids, sparingly soluble salts, or biological growth. To reduce the turbidity, the se...

With the increasing installed capacity of desalination, the greenhouse gas emission for generating the required energy to power the desalination plants is also becoming the focus of attention in the world community. Domestic reverse osmosis membranes have been very successful technology especially in the developing world to provide safe drinking water. The novel concept of photovoltaic powered ...

Large-scale desalination plants are complex systems with many inter-disciplinary interactions and different levels of subsystem hierarchy. Advanced complex systems design tools have been shown to have a positive impact on design in aerospace and automotive, but have generally not been used in the design of water systems. This work presents a multi-disciplinary design optimization approach to de...

Reverse osmosis (RO) is a compact process for the removal of ionic and organic pollutants from contaminated water. However, flux decline and rejection deterioration due to concentration polarization and membrane fouling hinders the application of RO technology. In this study, a rotating cylindrical RO membrane is theoretically investigated as a novel method to reduce polarization and fouling. A...

We present a numerical study of induced-charge electro-osmosis (ICEO) of electrolytes in microfluidic channels containing a fixed dielectric structure. ICEO is the nonlinear electro-osmotic slip that occurs in the electrolyte when an applied electric field acts on the ionic charge it induces around the polarizable surface of the dielectric structure. We also establish a method for optimizing th...

Electrically controlled dynamics of fluids and particles at microscales is a fascinating area of research with applications ranging from microfluidics and sensing to sorting of biomolecules. The driving mechanisms are electric forces acting on spatially separated charges in an isotropic medium such as water. Here, we demonstrate that anisotropic conductivity of liquid crystals enables new mecha...

The primary objective of desalination research is the development of a way to produce fresh water at lower cost. The present study investigated two freshwater production methods of Reverse Osmosis (RO) and Multi-Effect Humidification (MEH) (artificial distillation), and analyzed them from an economic standpoint, and subsequently pointed out the important and effective factors in decreasing salt...