Global freshwater scarcity has increased demand for efficient desalination and water purification technologies. Conventional desalination methods, particularly reverse osmosis, require high pressures and significant energy input to separate dissolved salts from water. This disclosure describes a desalination architecture that leverages electrostatic forces to induce controlled ionic drift within aqueous solutions. By establishing electric field gradients across engineered flow channels, dissolved ions may be selectively displaced and collected in designated regions, allowing partially desalinated water to be extracted without reliance on high-pressure membrane filtration. The proposed system may reduce mechanical energy requirements while enabling modular water-treatment configurations suitable for industrial, municipal, and decentralized water purification applications.
Matthew Dominik (Fri,) studied this question.