Project Info

Novel desalination clathrate hydrate technology

Carolyn Koh| ckoh@mines.edu

The goals of this project are to evaluate and develop a novel clathrate hydrate desalination technology. Clathrate hydrates have the unique property of excluding salt ions from the crystalline clathrate lattice when formed from saline solutions. By separating the clathrate hydrate crystals from the saline solution, fresh water is released from the clathrate crystals, while concentrating the remaining saline solution.
Addressing the tasks 1-3 below will provide important information towards advancing this desalination technology.

Specifically, the tasks will be to:
1) Synthesize clathrate hydrates from saline solution for different salt compositions and concentrations.
2) Measure the desalination efficiency of the process in (1) with electrical conductiviy measurements.
3) Perform rheological measurements of the clathrate hydrate/saline slurry that needs to remain flowable during the desalination process.

More Information

Koh, C.A., Sloan, E.D., Sum, A.K. and Wu, D.T., 2011. Fundamentals and applications of gas hydrates. Annual review of chemical and biomolecular engineering, 2, pp.237-257.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-chembioeng-061010-114152

Xu, H., Khan, M.N., Peters, C.J., Sloan, E.D. and Koh, C.A., 2018. Hydrate-Based Desalination Using Cyclopentane Hydrates at Atmospheric Pressure. Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data, 63(4), pp.1081-1087.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.jced.7b00815

Grand Engineering Challenge: Provide access to clean water