Surging population and climate change will push society, ever more urgently, to harvest lower quality or impaired water supplies (e.g., sea water or brackish groundwater) for drinking water. For example, desalination of sea water has become a promising technique for providing additional sources of fresh water along coastal communities. However, the widespread adoption of desalination technologies (Reverse Osmosis and Electrodialysis) is currently limited due to its energy intensive nature and/or limited membrane lifetime and performance, especially during high operation rates.

This work focuses on developing a novel, cost-effective, electrodialysis (ED) unit. Specifically, we have replaced planar electrodes in traditional electrodialysis units with 3-D electrodes. We hypothesize that the 3-D electrode bed configuration provides large surface area per unit volume, thereby allowing high currents to be drawn at current densities short of the diffusion-limited regime. Further, iR losses due to mass transfer limitation will be minimal.