The portable osmosis seawater desalination membrane device of Ningbo Institute of Materials, Chinese Academy of Sciences accelerates seawater

The reporter recently learned that the Marine Environmental Materials team of the Ningbo Institute of Materials of the Chinese Academy of Sciences broke through the relevant technical bottlenecks and produced a “portable” positive-permeability seawater desalination membrane device, which increased the conversion efficiency to more than 2.5 times that of similar products.

According to reports, the current domestic use of seawater desalination is the "reverse osmosis" seawater desalination technology. This is an extremely complicated system engineering. It not only has a large area, high energy consumption, but also high operating and maintenance costs. It is not suitable for small-scale application and promotion, and it is difficult to guarantee the effective supply of emergency nutrient solution in emergencies.

The “Positive Infiltration” technology based on the “Portable” desalination plant developed by the Ningbo Materials Institute is a forward-looking technology that has emerged in recent years. It does not require seawater pressure and has low energy consumption, which can greatly reduce the cost of “sea fresh water”. In the material development, the team of Ningbo Materials has finely regulated the pore structure of the support membrane, and then modified it to obtain a positive osmosis membrane material with excellent performance. The cross section of the material is an interpenetrating network structure, and the film strength is high, and the carboxyl group of PAA imparts stronger hydrophilicity to the film, which is favorable for the rapid passage of water molecules.

The team sealed the "upgraded version" of the osmosis membrane into four parts for emergency desalination. The test results show that the seawater desalination efficiency of the device is more than 2.5 times that of the similar products of HTI (Hydration Technologies Inc.). “The ability to restore the 'desalting' of the membrane without any core and simple cleaning has a significant advantage in handling highly polluted water bodies,” said the team leader.