Daniel here, checking in for an update!
Incredible start to the program for me here at Keck Hall Labs, Rice University.
Our REU team put together a group chat about a week before kickoff in a scramble to get connected and orient ourselves as much as possible before the program began. I found my fellow interns to be a fantastic group of hyper-talented individuals, from several different disciplines, and we all clicked very nicely before the first orientation.
We were joined by two of R-STEM’s Young Scholars as well, one of them, Cierra Weathers, a brilliant young lady with whom I now work with in our lab at Keck Hall.
I have to say, I was very impressed with Dr. Loyo’s orientation workshops. I found it extremely gratifying to have a background of NEWT Center and it’s goals. The stated connection between NEWT’s goals and that of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals I found to be particularly cool and familiar! At our very first workshop, after a couple of team building activities, we were invited to join a team Thrust meeting, where Ph.D. candidate (and my now lab-mate and mentor) Amit Jain shared his progress in Membrane Capacitive Deionization development. At the time I, admittedly, barely had a clue what he was on about despite my effort to soak information out of journals before the meeting.
Left to right: The champion spaghetti tower in all its glory, My mentor Jun Kim operating the SEM microscope, Cierra and I in the lab, up to no good.
I am now pleased to report that after a couple weeks of reading, watching, learning, pipetting, Autocad drafting, bugging my mentor (along with a couple of my office mates, lab mates, and [I’m sorry to say] the doctoral students in the next door lab) with a multitude of questions, I have finally acquired somewhat of a solid understanding of my work here at Rice, and as a result have chosen an aspect of our work here on which to focus my contribution in research.
MCDI [Membrane Capacitive Deionization] is a relatively new technology designed to purify salt water solutions by removing dissolved ions directly from the water. The brackish water is fed between two coated porous carbon electrodes at a fixed rate. The desalinization process occurs in cycles of two phases: Adsorption and Desorption. During adsorption, the electrodes are charged with an electrical difference. One electrode draws out the positive cations from the solution, while the other removes their negative counter-ions. During desorption, the charge polarity is reversed, releasing the ions from the electrodes as waste, preparing the electrodes for the next cycle.
Unlike popular alternatives such as Reverse Osmosis, MCDI requires much less energy to operate per-yield, since MCDI removes the salt directly from the water, rather than trying to remove the water from the salt through heat or pressure.
From my general given assignment, the optimization and improvement, of MCDI technology, I have decided to examine the possibility of energy regeneration through the channeling of the chemical potential energy pent up in the carbon electrodes after the adsorption cycle, converting it to electrical potential energy to be used to recharge the apparatus, or otherwise utilize the chemical potential to do work, removing ions from the water, improving energy efficiency and salt removal capacity in the system. This may potentially be achieved by chaining multiple electrode sets together with their cycles offset, but running simultaneously otherwise. The theoretical possibility for energy regeneration of the system, given the energy wasted by the chemical potential that is diffused off during the desorption cycle, is approximately 80%.
I am thoroughly excited to find out how close I may be able to get to that 80% this summer, and am once again extremely grateful to the outstanding staff here at NEWT Center and Rice University for the unbelievable support and the invaluable opportunity to conduct high-level research in one of the leading research facilities in the world. A lot of history and experience here.
More info to come soon!
-Daniel S. Cana
Glad to hear you are enjoying yourself and working hard Daniel! I know that you will continue to make the most of this opportunity! I look forward to seeing how your research will progress.