Experimental performance assessment of electrodes and numerical analysis of flow channel for CDI

One possible solution suggested providing drinkable water with an expense of small amount of energy and investment is desalinating water with the capacitive deionization (CDI) technique. The idea of CDI is to successfully remove any ions dissolved in water by applying electrical field between electrodes and flowing water between the electrodes. The most commonly used electrode materials are carbon aerogel and activated-carbon because of their corrosion resistance and large specific area, which can provide major advantages for electrochemical adsorption processes in an aqueous solution. Through experiments using three electrode materials, we compared the ion adsorption performance of the electrodes from three different viewpoints: per unit mass, total used area and volume of electrode. Specific area is an important figure, but pore size distribution and pore structure should also be considered in comparing electrodes. Carbon aerogel outperforms carbon felt and activated carbon in ion removal per unit surface area and volume. But in of ion removal per unit mass, carbon felt outperforms carbon aerogel and activated carbon. Also, comparing the ion removing performance of electrodes in different initial concentrations, as the initial concentration increases, activated carbon increases in performance but aerogel's performance decreases. This means even if carbon aerogel had a better ion removing performance, activated carbon could perform higher in a higher concentration. Therefore, all these parameters should be considered when designing a desalination plant using CDI technology. Most previous studies related to CDI concentrated on developing novel materials for electrodes suitable for CDI application while little attention was given to how the CDI system is to be designed for maximizing the performance. Since we believe that other design parameters such as gap distance between the capacitor should be considered seriously also, a numerical study was conducted to observe how each design parameter reflects on the overall system performance. Through the investigation, we have observed that the source density has a strong effect on the water recovery ratio but has a negligible effect on the product concentration. Thus, developing novel materials for electrodes alone cannot promise satisfying overall system performance, especially if we want to build a compact and economical desalination system with the CDI technology. This study purpose not only electrode material study but also numerical analysis of flow channel via effective diffusion coefficient modeling through the parametric study such as electrode length, gap distance, source density and cell voltage to build system design code for CDI technology