Project Grant 7200ME18IO00002

The U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation awarded a $351,572.23 Cooperative Agreement to William Marsh Rice University under the Water Desalination Research and Development program (CFDA 15.506). The goal of this 21-month project, with a completion date of September 30, 2025, is to develop ion exchange membranes with tunable ion permeability and permselectivity to enhance water recovery while ensuring product water quality in electrodialysis desalination processes. This...

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...

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:...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was awarded a $950,000 cooperative agreement from the Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation under the Water Desalination Research and Development program (CFDA 15.506) to conduct last-mile pilots and translate low-cost, time-variant electrodialysis reversal brackish water desalination with optimized brine management from an academic prototype to a commercial product for rural and tribal communities. Leveraging prior innovations funded...

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 $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...

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 $500,277.45 Cooperative Agreement to the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) on March 5, 2025, under the Water Desalination Research and Development Program (CFDA 15.506). The purpose of this award is to develop field-effect transistor nanosensors for testing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in impacted water and air. NJIT, a well-established academic research institution, will leverage its expertise in areas such as environmental science,...

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,...