Design of a Cost-Effective Portable Seawater Desalination Unit for Generating Drinkable Water

A portable seawater desalination system would be highly desirable to solve water challenges in rural areas and disaster situations. While many reverse osmosis-based portable desalination systems are already available commercially, they are not adequate for providing reliable drinking water in remote locations due to the requirement of high-pressure pumping and repeated maintenance. The current work focused on demonstrating a field-deployable desalination system with multistage membrane filtration processes, composed of two-stage ion concentration polarization, to convert seawater to drinkable water. A model is designed to be used with optimized the multistage configuration, and showed good agreement with the experimental results. The portable system desalinates seawater (2.5–45 g/L) into drinkable water (defined by WHO guideline), with the energy consumptions of 15.6–26.6 W h/L (seawater). In addition, the process can also reduce suspended solids by at least a factor of 10 from the source water, resulting in crystal clear water (