Project Grant 20183361028276

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...

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...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $550,000 Project Grant under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to The Regents of the University of Colorado, doing business as the University of Colorado (CU), to develop an innovative pressure-driven distillation process for advanced water treatment. The 5-year project aims to reinvent distillation technology to efficiently treat impaired water sources, such as wastewater and saline water, by using membranes with tailored surface structures...

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 $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...

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 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...

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...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) Project Grant award of $274,994 supports the development of an innovative, membrane-free, and chemical-free desalination technology based on ion concentration polarization. The goal is to create a scalable system that can effectively transition from a bench-scale production capacity of 10 liters per hour to a larger-scale capacity of 1,000 liters per hour. This advancement aims to make desalination more...

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,...