Worth their salt

Abstract

Researchers are making efforts to desalination of saline water or sea water to produce potable water due to increasing demand for potable water. The federal government of Australia invested $1.6 billion to develop Western Corridor Recycled Water project to recycle water for power stations, industry, and residential purpose. Desalination can be done by using electrodialysis, membrane distillation, solar desalination, or capacitive deionization. Electrodialysis process involves the removal of salt ions by the membrane from the solution, while reverse osmosis process uses water-permeable membranes. Researchers are developing a new electrodialysis membranes by using functional nanomaterials and polymer nanocomposites. Electrodialysis technology can control the quantity of ions being removed from the solutions that make this technology a suitable substitute of the reverse osmosis process