A 2-D model of electrodialysis stacks including the effects of membrane deformation

Current distribution along electrodialysis stacks and its influence on the current-voltage curve: behaviour from near-zero current to limiting plateau

“…Attaining a good trade-off between productivity and specific energy consumption, which are the two most representative performance metrics, has been unfeasible so far. In recent years, considerable efforts have been devoted to modelling [11][12][13] and experimental [14][15][16][17] studies of seawater desalination via ED, highlighting these process limitations. It follows that ED is not yet competitive compared to conventional desalination technologies [4,18], unless dilute solutions are treated.…”

“…In addition, multiple stages can be designed with a different number of cell pairs or with different membrane types to further enhance the process [16,17,40]. Multi-stage configurations and other systems with electrode segmentation were investigated in ED [11,12,14,16,17,[40][41][42], as well as in other electro-membrane processes as reverse electrodialysis (RED) [43][44][45][46][47], ED with bipolar membranes [48], electrochemical fuel cells [49,50], and redox flow batteries [51,52]. Several studies showed that multi-staging is a strategy that offers interesting solutions to ensure that the ED stacks can work more efficiently.…”