Microbial Desalination
An exploratory research to assess the potential of desalination by microbial methods
C.J. Meerstadt (TU Delft - Civil Engineering & Geosciences)
MK Kreuk – Coach (TU Delft - Sanitary Engineering)
David G. Weissbrodt – Mentor (TU Delft - BT/Environmental Biotechnology)
Sebastiaan Heijman – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Sanitary Engineering)
Marta Cerruti – Coach (TU Delft - BT/Environmental Biotechnology)
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Abstract
As freshwater resources are predicted to become more scarce in the future, desalination will become a more prevalent treatment method. Microbial desalination, defined as the use of microbial processes to remove ions from a saline solution, may have potential as a new desalination method to produce water for domestic, agricultural or industrial purposes. This research explored the theory, performance, application and feasibility of microbial desalination. It consists of three research lines. Firstly, the performance and optimal conditions for microbial desalination were examined in batch experiments. In the second research line, the use of microbial ion transport proteins in a biomimetic membrane was proposed and the microbial light powered transport protein SyHr was genetically designed and expressed for this purpose. Finally, two models weremade which evaluate the feasibility ofmicrobial desalination at full scale; one which compares the costs of microbial desalination in sequencing batch reactors to seawater reverse osmosis and one to calculate the recovery and required size of a biomimetic membrane as described in the second
research line. Based on the results of all research lines, it was concluded that microbial desalination is be a promising new technology for desalination, which should be further developed.