Abstract
Electrodialysis (ED) presents a competitive method for desalinating brackish waters. Herein we perform cost optimization of a single-stack ED system across a range of feed salinities and water recoveries while optimizing operating voltage, number of cell pairs, and cell length. The results of our optimization show that the levelized cost of water (LCOW) increases with an increase in feed salinity. The outcomes of our optimization show that cost-optimal design generally increases cell length while decreasing cell pair number and operating voltage with an increase in salinity. These trends are nonlinear, with the number of cell pairs and applied voltage exhibiting local maxima when operating at low salinity and high recovery. We discuss the underlying mechanism for cell length becoming a leveraging design parameter by inspecting the length-dependent profiles of key electrochemical properties of the ED cell. Finally, we present how increasing performance metrics and decreasing costs impact LCOW, demonstrating that innovations that decrease counter-current diffusion have resulted in the highest decrease of LCOW.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 118512 |
| Journal | Desalination |
| Volume | 601 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 15 2025 |
Funding
This project was funded by the United States Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory, in part, through a site support contract. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, nor the support contractor, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof. This material is based upon work supported by the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), funded by the U.S. Department of Energy , Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Industrial Efficiency & Decarbonization Office , under Funding Opportunity Announcement Number DE-FOA-0001905 . The version of IPOPT implemented in this work was compiled using HSL, a collection of Fortran codes for large-scale scientific computation. See http://www.hsl.rl.ac.uk .
Keywords
- Desalination
- Electrodialysis
- Modeling
- Nonlinear optimization