Water is not just the essential ingredient for life, but also a fundamental factor in the economy and security of any country. Coupled with increased population and climate change effect, the availability of food, water, and energy are the biggest challenges that the world faces. Over the next two decades water demand will exceed water supply by about 40% according to many scientific studies and reports. Food and energy shortages have also been described by the UK Government's Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof. Sir John Beddington, to create the "perfect storm" by 2030.

The provision of drinkable supplies through desalination could offer a sustainable solution to the drinking water problem but also presents a technical challenge too.

Seawater and brackish water are desalinated by thermal distillation and membrane methods such as reverse osmosis (RO) and electrodialysis. All these methods involve high operating and investment costs. RO is the most widely used desalination techniques, while thermal methods are mainly used in the Gulf countries. However, the high operating cost of RO is due to essential pre-treatment, scaling, bio-fouling and the high-energy consumption.

Novel desalination and renewable power generation membrane processes have been invented and developed at the Centre for Osmosis Research and Applications at the University of Surrey in collaboration with Modern Water plc. The modelling opportunities in membrane processes involve flow and mass transfer of Forward and Reverse Osmosis Processes as well as hydrodynamic and colloidal Interactions. The CORA team is also working on thermally driven membrane processes such as membrane distillation as well as direct contact heart transfer exchanger for both desalination and power generation.

The talk will present the principles of the desalination and power generation processes, results and the areas which needs modelling and optimisation.