Marc Andelman of Mespilus, Inc.

Marc Andelman will be presenting "Three Generations of Capacitive Deionzation" on February 1, 2017 at 4:10 PM in Neville Hall, Room 003.

Salts and other t.d.s are often limiting contaminant for water purification, recycling and reuse.  The difficulty of dealing with t.d.s is reflected in the fact that only a few methods have ever been invented for this problem. Chief among these is the membrane technology Reverse osmosis (RO). RO has intrinsically low water recovery, high energy and maintenance needs. A recently marketed alternative, called capacitive deionization, has better water recovery and energy usage. This method removes salts, arsenic, heavy metals, fluoride, nitrate, and other t.d.s., A third generation innovation in this field, “Polarized Electrode Capacitive Deionization”, has been more recently invented which works without the expensive ion exchange membranes required for efficiency in previous versions. This new invention works involves adding fixed surface charges which impart ion selective functionality into the working capacitor electrode material.  The reason that fixed surface charges would cause electrodes to behave this way is an inevitable consequence of the nano length scale of the micropores required for a material to function as a good super capacitor material in the first place. This latest result is a fundamental new method to purify salts from water where the operating part is made entirely from inexpensive materials, such as activated carbon, a nanoporous material that happens to be one of the world’s highest volume commodities, already used in water.