WATER-ENERGY NEXUS

Fresh water is a precious resource. The global climate change is expected to cause major droughts and severe shortage of fresh water in many parts of the world. We aim to develop innovative heat and mass exchangers to treat high-salinity water (such as RO discharge, brackish ground water, irrigation run-off, and produced water from oil and gas fields) using thermal desalination techniques.

Our heat and mass exchangers utilize fascinating flow instability phenomena to achieve evaporation and condensation of water vapor in highly energy and cost efficient manner. We perform fundamental studies of flow and heat/mass transfer phenomena to enable rigorous physics-based optimization of the components and systems.

Our work on a string-based dehumidifier was featured in Science Advances (Science Advances, 2019;5: eaav7662).