Integration of renewable energy into membrane-based water treatment
Climate change is currently a severe challenge faced by global communities. Our group develops a solar-powered, portable water treatment unit, enabling in situ converting brackish water into drinking water. Operation process of this unit is expected to be effective and energy-efficient, contributing to Quebec’s efforts on exploring advanced technologies for reducing carbon emission in industries.
Advanced membranes for water and wastewater treatment
To overcome the limitations of conventional membranes, we develop advanced electrified membranes (EMs) with low-cost, green materials. EMs exploit conductive and porous substrates for filtration, and enable the co-occurrence of electro-basic phenomena (e.g., electro-redox, electrosorption and electro-repulsion) in addition to membrane rejection. These synergies enable EMs to outperform conventional membrane processes in fouling control, water purification and resource recovery, while being energy-efficient.
Electrified water treatment technologies
We work on electrically-powered water treatment processes, aiming to take advantage of local temperature/pH variations near the electrodes to carry out the desired reactions. The goal is to reduce the use of large quantities of aggressive chemicals (e.g. coagulants and oxidizers) for water treatment.
For examples, we study the effect of natural-flocculant enhanced electrocoagulation as an effective pre-treatment for membrane-based desalination; we used Joule heating to accelerate the kinetics of pollutant adsorption; and we exploit the local pH dynamics at porous electrodes to achieve silica removal through ionization and electrosorption.
