Cooperative Agreement R19AC00158

This $1,257,873 cooperative agreement from the Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation will fund research at the Colorado School of Mines to improve reverse osmosis desalination technology for remote communities. Under the Water Desalination Research and Development program (CFDA 15.506), the School of Mines will augment a 20 gallon per minute, 8-element reverse osmosis unit from DuPont Water Solutions with smart scaling precursor detection and resource recovery from concentrate to...

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation awarded a $391,660.68 Cooperative Agreement to the Regents of the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) under the Water Desalination Research and Development program (CFDA 15.506). The goal of this 2-year project is to test a novel vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) light-driven photochemical process for treating nitrate and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from inland desalination brine. The project will develop an innovative VUV system to overcome...

This Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation, under the Water Desalination Research and Development Program (CFDA 15.506), aims to demonstrate a continuous pilot photobioreactor operation using sunlight to remove scaling compounds from reverse osmosis concentrate. The project team at Texas State University has developed a new photobiological process that utilizes brackish diatoms and natural sunlight to remove scalants such as silica, phosphate,...

The Bureau of Reclamation, through its Desalination and Water Purification Research (DWPR) program (CFDA 15.506), awarded a $500,972 cooperative agreement to Temple University on Sep 13, 2023. The goal of this 2-year effort is to develop an energy-neutral desalination system by integrating electroactive forward osmosis (EFO) and microbial desalination cells (MDCs). The EFO process will recover clean water from wastewater, producing concentrated wastewater and diluted seawater. The concentrated...

This Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation under the Water Desalination Research and Development Program (CFDA 15.506) provides $733,555.62 to support field testing of advanced reverse osmosis water treatment technologies. The project aims to demonstrate the performance of "batch reverse osmosis" and "active reverse osmosis" membrane systems in treating high total dissolved solids brackish groundwater with mineral scaling...

This federal Cooperative Agreement award, valued at $1,875,000.00 and granted by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (CFDA 81.089 - Fossil Energy Research and Development), aims to develop a process to make the treatment of oil and gas produced water for beneficial use economically feasible. The project will characterize produced water from specific sites, including the Marcellus and Utica areas, and develop a multi-step treatment process combining...

Colorado School of Mines was awarded a $408,664 project grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems under the NSF Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to develop an advanced membrane distillation process for desalinating and recycling complex wastewaters. Through computational fluid dynamics modeling and bench-scale experiments, the School will work to harness buoyancy-driven instabilities to improve mixing within membrane...

The U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation, under its Desalination and Water Purification Research (DWPR) program (CFDA 15.506), awarded a $610,056 Cooperative Agreement to Pacifica Water Solutions LLC on Sep 21, 2023. The project aims to conduct extended field testing of innovative electrically conducting desalination membranes against commercial membranes over two consecutive 3-month trials. The testing will demonstrate the performance of this technology in two applications:...

This federal Cooperative Agreement award from the Bureau of Reclamation, under the Water Desalination Research and Development program (CFDA 15.506), provides $713,865.71 to the Regents of the University of Colorado for a research and development project to improve reverse osmosis desalination technology. The key objectives are to integrate a smart scaling precursor detection system with a reverse osmosis demonstration unit to minimize operational issues, and to test a novel concentrate recovery...

The Bureau of Reclamation awarded a $396,545.92 Cooperative Agreement to the Regents of the University of Colorado on November 21, 2023 through the Water Desalination Research and Development program (CFDA 15.506). This project aims to develop scalable, robust, surface-patterned microporous membranes designed for a membrane distillation process to treat highly concentrated brines. Key objectives include: (1) developing a roll-to-roll manufacturing method for 8-inch wide surface-patterned...