Energy-Water Desalination Hub

The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) is an Energy Innovation Hub created in  2020 and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct early-stage research on  desalination and associated water-treatment technologies to secure affordable and energy efficient water supplies for the United States from non-traditional water sources. NAWI’s five year research program was guided by a national road mapping process designed to engage  stakeholders from the water-treatment and water-use ecosystem and by several requests for  preproposals to solicit research ideas through a competitive, peer-reviewed process.

Major reductions in cost and energy use, and improvements in water supply resilience, can be  achieved by enabling distributed water desalination and reuse. To achieve these reductions,  research is needed to establish water systems that are autonomous, precise, resilient, process intensified, modular, and electrically (collectively referred to as A-PRIME) powered. This A PRIME strategy will transform the energy sector’s produced water from a waste product to a  valuable resource; significantly lower the freshwater use intensity in United States power  plants; expand water reuse and resource recovery from municipal and industrial wastewater;  and accelerate the deployment of distributed, resilient, smart grid–enabled water supplies for  United States industries and communities.

NAWI’s research program was structured around three research topic areas. The Materials and  Manufacturing topic area focused on the discovery of better-performing desalination materials  and components and enhanced desalination manufacturing processes. The Process Innovation  and Intensification topic area focused on the development of novel water treatment and  desalination processes, intensified process concepts, and automation methods and systems.  The Data, Modeling, and Analysis topic area focused on the development and enhancement of  high-fidelity computer models for water-treatment process and system optimization, a suite of  data management and techno-economic analytical tools, and novel methods to enable  quantitative analysis of the impact of water treatment.