Energy Harvesting from Wastewater Using Nanofluidic Reverse Electrodialysis

Abstract

Energy is one of the most important issues in the world owing to the steady growth of energy demands, serious concern about fossil fuel exhaustion, and environmental problems. Reverse electrodialysis (RED), which is a technique to capture the useful energy from mixing the solutions of different concentration, is recently recognized as an efficient method to alleviate the current issue associated with the energy. This chapter reviews the RED studies using nanoporous membranes (named as nanofluidic reverse electordialysis, NRED) in place of conventional polymer membranes having no physical pore. This chapter is made up six parts: the mechanism, the fabrication of nanostructures, the influence of operating parameters (concentration gradient and pore size), the materials, the efforts on enhancing performance (surface modification technique and large area platform), the numerical modeling, and, lastly, the feasible applications.