(299h) Developing a Mechanistic Transport Model for Electrodialysis/Electrodialysis Reversal Process

Developing a Mechanistic Transport Model for Electrodialysis/Electrodialysis Reversal Process

Azadeh Ghorbani *, Leila Karimi, Abbas Ghassemi, Jim Loya

Institute for Energy and the Environment New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA. *azadeh12@nmsu.edu

There is no doubt that the fresh water demand will continue to increases due to the growth of the world’s population and the increase of the worldwide demand on consumer goods. Technologies that were originally developed to desalinate water such as Reverse Osmosis (RO) and Electrodialysis/ Electrodialysis Reversal, ED/EDR, are widely applied to remove contaminants other than salt from freshwater supplies.

ED/EDR is an Electrical-driven membrane technology that is effective with salt removal in which ions are transferred through ion exchange membrane. These process would cost less compared to the RO process but no complete model has been presented yet. Therefore, there is a definite need for presenting a model which would include mechanistic transport model.

Modeling is a critical step representing the process and the construction of system of interest. One of the significant features of a model is to enable the user to predict the effect of changes to the system without imposing cost.

Transport models relate fluxes through the active layers to driving forces and provide mechanistic descriptions of how material travels through the membrane media.

Mechanistic transport models may be used to predict how a particular membrane will perform in a new process, or may help to develop new membrane characteristics. Development of a reliable membrane transport model for describing mass transport phenomena in ED/EDR is a highly desirable goal since not only does this allow the analysis of performance characteristics of a membrane, but can also assist in the designing new membranes.

In this study, the existing models of RO were reviewed and investigated in order to develop a novel mechanistic transport model for ED/EDR processes.