The Claude ’Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant near U.S. Route 101 (the Pacific Coast Highway) in the northern portion of San Diego County; Carlsbad, California. (Credit: Art Wager/iStock)
Promising design rules for cost-effective desalination rely on just a few ingredients: ionic liquids plus low-cost geothermal or solar heat, or waste heat from machines. A s populations boom and chronic droughts persist, coastal cities like Carlsbad in Southern California have increasingly turned to ocean desalination to supplement a dwindling fresh water supply. Now scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) investigating how to make desalination less expensive have hit on promising design rules for making so-called "thermally responsive" ionic liquids to separate water from salt. Ionic liquids are liquid salts that bind to water, making them useful in forward osmosis to separate contaminants from water. (See Berkeley Lab Q&A, " Moving Forward on Desalination.") Even better are thermally responsive ionic liquids as they use thermal energy rather than electricity, which is required by conventional reverse osmosis (RO) desalination for the separation. The new Berkeley Lab study, published recently Communications Chemistry , studied the chemical structures of several types of ionic liquid/water to determine what "recipe" would work best. "The current state-of-the-art in RO desalination works very well, but the cost of RO desalination driven by electricity is prohibitive," said Robert Kostecki , co-corresponding author of the study.
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