MITÂ News October 8, 2024
In the developing world, where there are unreliable energy sources of water, they rely increasingly on saline groundwater. Traditional renewable desalination technologies require sizable energy storage for sufficient water production, leading to increased cost, maintenance and complexity. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, UK, Germany) demonstrated a simple control strategy using photovoltaic electrodialysis (PV-ED) to enable direct-drive optimally controlled desalination at high production rates. This control scheme was implemented on a fully autonomous, community-scale PV-ED prototype system and operated for 6 months in New Mexico on real brackish groundwater. The prototype fully harnessed 94% of the extracted PV energy despite featuring an energy storage to water productivity ratio of over 99%. According to the researchers flow-commanded current control PV-ED provides a simple strategy to desalinate water for resource-constrained communities and has implications for decarbonizing larger, energy-intensive desalination industries… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
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Conceptual diagram of a batch electrodialysis system. Credit: Nature Water, 8 October 2024