Project Grant 1745846

This $100,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program will support the development of passive solar desalination technology for produced water from oil and gas extraction sites. The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station will modify existing solar evaporation ponds using hierarchical nanstructured hydrogel materials to increase evaporation rates and superhydrophobic coatings to enhance water droplet departure on glass...

This $500,000 Project Grant award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) under CFDA 81.135 will support the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in developing a highly energy-efficient desalination system using solar thermal energy and multi-stage distillation. The key innovation is a phase change process at the liquid-solid-vapor interface to efficiently transport and utilize energy, which aims to significantly reduce energy consumption compared to industrial...

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...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) supports the development of cost- and energy-efficient brine treatment technologies to enable decarbonized brackish water desalination (BWD) as a climate-adaptive water supply strategy. The $1,235,696 award to Arizona State University aims to achieve the following key objectives over the 4-year project period ending September 2028: Develop a novel process integrating nanofiltration and reverse...

This $250,000 National Science Foundation project grant, funded under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), supports the development of a solar evaporator-based, high-efficiency water desalination system. Northeastern University will work to optimize an all-in-one solar evaporator using a novel design of a planar, interconnected open-pore copper-copper oxide foam structure. This is intended to provide a cost-effective (4.5 kg/sqm/hr) desalination solution driven directly by solar irradiation. A...

This Cooperative Agreement awarded by the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation under the Water Desalination Research and Development program (CFDA 15.506) aims to leverage the University of Minnesota's expertise in understanding spatial and temporal temperature variation and brine evaporation behavior. The $244,342 award, with a period of performance from October 2023 to September 2025, seeks to confirm that altering the temperature of brine solutions can make it favorable for...

The Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy awarded a $500,000 Cooperative Agreement under the Conservation Research and Development program (CFDA 81.086) to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) for the development of a highly efficient and novel distillation-assisted membrane for direct lithium extraction from geothermal brines. The project aims to advance technology in the areas of critical minerals recovery and industrial...

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,...

Greenpath Systems LLC was awarded a $199,948 project grant from the Department of Energy Office of Science on June 27, 2022 to develop a multi-stage nanofiltration process for extracting value-added minerals from produced water. The project is being conducted under the Office of Science Financial Assistance Program (CFDA 81.049), which supports basic research to transform understanding of nature and advance U.S. energy security and economic competitiveness. Specifically, Greenpath Systems will...

The Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation awarded a $500,027 cooperative agreement to the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (Tees) to develop a novel thermal desalination process for treating high salinity produced water. The goal is to reduce fresh water utilization for oil and gas operations while creating a higher quality water source. The work will be carried out in College Station, Texas through December 2024 under the Water Desalination Research and Development...