(643e) Numerical and Analytical Ion Transport Model to Investigate the Influence of Convection in Electrodialysis Reversal

Azadeh Ghorbani *, Abbas Ghassemi

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

There is no doubt that demand for fresh water will continue to increase as the world’s population grows and as the global demand for consumer goods increases. Desalination processes, which remove salts from saline water to create freshwater, are a group of technologies with the potential to help meet this demand.

One of the main technologies for water desalination is Electrodialysis reversal (EDR), which uses electrical potential difference to drive ions through a porous media called an ion exchange membrane. Despite this technology’s widespread use, there is not currently a complete theoretical model for how ions transfer through the ion exchange membrane under the driving force of electrical potential difference: while current models account for the driving forces of migration and diffusion, convection has not been addressed.

A model which includes all three forces could create more accurate data and help design more efficient EDR technologies.  For this reason a complete model is highly desirable, and the goal of this study is to create such a model using computational fluid dynamics to include convection forces.