Project Grant DESC0015797

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 $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 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 National Science Foundation (NSF) Project Grant award under CFDA 47.041 Engineering program provides $1,235,696 to Arizona State University (ASU) to develop cost- and energy-efficient brine treatment technologies that enable decarbonized brackish water desalination (BWD) for climate-adaptive water supply. The 4-year project aims to: 1) create a novel nanofiltration and reverse osmosis process to reduce brine volume; 2) design an innovative interface-enhanced crystallizer for...

This Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Renewable Energy Research and Development (CFDA 81.087) program provides $1,585,180 to North Carolina State University to develop a novel piston-pump system and corresponding controller to repurpose the Liquid Robotics Wave Glider as a mobile, anchorless desalination device. The project will focus on an integrated co-design approach, including the piston...

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,...

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...

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:...

E3Tecservice LLC received a $199,423 Project Grant award from the Department of Energy Office of Science on June 27, 2022 to support research on renewable ocean thermal energy for low-pressure desalination of seawater with co-production of ammonia. The award is being administered under the Office of Science Financial Assistance Program (CFDA #81.049), which supports basic research to deliver scientific discoveries and tools that transform understanding of nature and advance U.S. energy...

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...