Innovative Water Desalination System for Small Communities

In many parts of the country groundwater withdrawals exceed recharge rates and this has caused groundwater-level declines, reductions to the volume of groundwater in storage, lower streamflow and lake levels. Development of brackish groundwater and seawater as an alternative water sources can_x000D_ help address concerns about the future availability of water. Thus, there is a need for a technology that produces high yields of clean water that: 1) can desalinate brackish water (which is actually plentiful throughout the US) and seawater, 2) has a low operating cost, 3) that is scalable from producing up to_x000D_ 1,000,000 gallons per day of potable the can meet the need of small communities._x000D_ _x000D_ To address this problem, TDA will develop thermally regenerable sorbents. The advantages of thermally regenerable sorbents are: 1) they do not require high pressures (like reverse osmosis (RO)), 2) no additional chemicals are needed for regeneration (unlike conventional ion exchange), and 3) they require much less energy than distillation because the sorbent removes soluble ions (the minor components), rather separating the major component (water). In this project we propose to make new, more robust resins, specifically for thermal desalination and thereby develop a process that is less expensive than RO.