A theoretical model for salt ion drift due to electric field suitable to seawater desalination

Abstract

A seawater desalination method due to a high voltage static electric field that drifts the dissolved salt ions is proposed in this paper. The electric field creates opposite forces to the positive and negative charged ions of continuously flowing seawater and forces them to drift to the sidewalls of the duct, the center of which is less salted then. Both the transient and the steady-state ion distributions are studied analytically. The effects of various parameters, such as the electric field intensity, the width of the duct and drift time of ions inside the duct are studied. The method is found to work well as the width of the duct and the electric field intensity increase. Moreover, significant salt concentration reduction can be succeeded, even <95%, in reasonable time, less than 10 s, for electric fields of the order 104 V/m, which makes the proposed method efficient and low cost. In a nutshell, his method can be very helpful in the problem solution of fresh water shortage.