Abstract: Desalination technologies are close to a silver bullet for solving myriad water challenges, from providing clean drinking water to making industrial wastewater safe for discharge. But these technologies are energy intense and many have been historically optimized for treating seawater. This talk will address recent efforts in improving the energetics and economics of treating hypersaline produced water – tough-to-treat wastewaters with up to near 10x the salinity of seawater. First, fundamental thermodynamic studies to improve the efficiency of humidification-dehumidification, an emerging and robust desalination technology, will be discussed. A generalization of these methods will then be shown and applied to understand and improve the efficiency of other hypersaline systems. Then, field data and thermochemical analysis of produced water from wells in three sites across North America will be presented, leading to a novel pre-treatment concept with the potential to halve chemical dosing costs relative to state of the art. Finally, plans for future research on decarbonizing thermal energy use in the industrial sector will be briefly discussed.

Bio: Gregory Thiel currently serves as an ARPA-E Fellow in the U.S. Department of Energy. His prior experience includes work on automotive climate control and battery cooling systems and research on hypersaline produced water treatment. He has published on topics in energy efficiency and entropy generation minimization, heat and mass transfer, and wastewater chemistry. Greg has also taught heat transfer and has broad interest in fundamental thermal sciences and economy-wide decarbonization. He holds a B.S.E., summa cum laude, from Case Western Reserve University, and an S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT – all in mechanical engineering.