Thermodynamic insights on desalination processes: exergy analysis, minimum separation work, and advances in capacitive deionization with battery electrodes

Abstract

Desalination plays a crucial role in addressing freshwater scarcity resulting from the rising population, industrial expansion, and the impacts of climate change. It employs various technologies tailored to varying levels of salinity. While energy efficiency is a primary focus in desalination, its intuitive interpretation is challenging due to process variations. This viewpoint offers a thermodynamics-based understanding of energy consumption by examining it in terms of irreversible dissipation and minimal separation energy. This study examines the relationship between exergy variations across different desalination technologies, which provides insight into the minimum separation energy and serves as a basis for classifying desalination processes. Simultaneously, particular emphasis is placed on capacitive deionization (CDI) as an emerging desalination technology that requires only incremental advancements to overcome current limitations associated with high feed-water salinity and the restricted desalination capacity of conventional carbon-based electrodes. The integration of advanced battery materials, including sodium-ion and chloride-ion battery systems, with CDI represents a promising strategy to enhance deionization efficiency, thereby enabling the development of higher-performance desalination technologies.