Emerging Applications in Electrochemical Separations (Invited Talks)

Electrochemical separations is undergoing a renaissance. The resurgence has been fueled in large part by innovations made in material science, deploying advanced metrology techniques, and outside the box thinking in terms of new process architectures. Recent developments have shown their feasibility in applications as diverse as water desalination, environmental remediation, selective ion recovery, and even gas-phase capture. Electrochemical separation processes can bring tremendous advantages in terms of sustainability and performance, including modularity, integration with reactors for simultaneous reactions-separations (an example of process intensification), on/off-grid integration, reduction of energetic costs, and minimizing secondary pollution. The discovery and development of novel materials has been key to achieving higher separation performance and selectivity, whether it is through tuning the adsorptive properties of the electrodes, or enhancing the performance of membranes. Unconventional and advanced metrology such as in-operando imaging of processes or dilatometry, coupled with current distribution analysis, have revealed new underlying mechanisms for electrochemical transport and interactions. In parallel, new modes of electrokinetic phenomena shown by both theory and experiments have been applied to great effect for ion removal in continuous mode. This session brings key invited contributions from experts in the field, with an emphasis on both electrochemical fundamentals and separation principles.