- A battery-powered high efficiency seawater desalination technology is developed by a joint research team between Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) and Suncheonhyang University utilizing carbon nanotube.

  - It is selected as a paper in Water Research the most prestigious scientific journal in the water resources field in the world.

■‘A Battery-powered High Efficiency Carbon Nanotube-based Seawater Desalination Technology’by a joint research team between Separation and Conversion Materials Laboratory (Dr. Kim Dong-kook and Dr. Yoo Chung-yul) of KIER (headed by Kwak Byong-Sung) and Energy System Department (Professor Cho Young-hyun) of Suncheonhyang University is printed in Water Research the most prestigious scientific journal in the water resources field in the world.

■ Battery-powered seawater desalination: a technology to refine salt from the seawater utilizing battery power (in which sodium and chlorine ions included in the seawater move to the anode and the cathode, respectively, to finally get fresh water). It is a recently-spotlighted desalination technology with higher energy efficiency compared with the existing filter or distillation-based technologies.

■ Water Research: The first ranking international scientific journal in the water resources field. (published by Elsevier, SCI IF 7.051)

■ In order to solve the problem of the lack of water the world over, the importance of the technology of the seawater desalination is being emphasized. Current typical seawater desalination technologies are Multi-Stage Flash method in which you turn the seawater into steam for desalination and Reverse Osmosis method using a separation membrane to get fresh water, but they need to be improved since the installation and operation of the facilities are expensive with them while their energy efficiency is low.

■ Although a battery-powered desalination technology utilizing streaming electrodes is lately spotlighted with its high energy efficiency, its shortfall is pointed out as the conductivity of the electrodes is low in it since it uses a fluid, different from the existing seawater desalination technologies which use fixed electrodes. For due to the low conductivity in them, the quantities of salt ions absorbed into the electrode materials are reduced, lowering their desalination performances.

■ In order to overcome this problem, the research team succeeded in enhancing the conductivity of the streaming electrodes by chemically treating carbon nanotubes that have high conductivity and then adding them to the activated carbon slurry electrodes.

■ The 1 mm-long carbon nanotubes added to the electrodes play a role as a bridge for conductivity, electrically connecting the activated carbon particles existing in the fluid. As more salt ions are absorbed onto the activated carbon particles thus connected, the desalination performance is increased by more than four times compared with the existing desalination technologies.

■ Dr. Kim Dong-kook and Dr. Yoo Chung-yul, the lead author and the corresponding author of the research paper, respectively, disclosed, “The highly-conductive streaming electrode technology developed this time is one that can solve the problem of the lowering of the desalination performances, of the existing battery-powered seawater desalination technologies, due to the low conductivity in them.”

■ And the joint researcher professor Cho Young-hyun of Suncheonhyang University said,“We confirmed the possibility of high-efficiency and high-capacity seawater desalination by enhancing the existing desalination performances by more than four times through the highly-conductive streaming electrode technology, and, based on this, will advance the commercialization of the new desalination technology which will replace the existing Reverse Osmosis and Multi-Stage Flash methods.”

■ The joint research team between KIER and Suncheonhyang University published‘A Battery-powered Seawater Desalination Technology Based on Three-dimensional Structure That Is Easy to Make of High-capacity’ as a cover research paper in Energy & Environmental Science the most prestigious scientific journal in the energy-environment field in the world in 2017 while it is actively performing research activities as a lead group on the next-generation seawater desalination technologies.