Summary of Research Interests
We are interested in advancing desalination via materials, system, and process innovations and by enhancing our fundamental understanding of various desalination processes including membrane distillation, reverse osmosis, forward osmosis and capacitive deionization. Our current research embraces material development, system health monitoring of unit processes, design of novel operational schemes, and system-scale analysis of the thermodynamics, energetics and kinetics of desalination processes.
Another active research area in our group is interfacial phenomena relevant to environmental engineering and science. In particular, we are interested in acquiring fundamental understanding on dynamic wetting of porous media and adhesion of model foulants onto surfaces of special wettability in aqueous medium. Eventually, our goal is to apply these fundamental understandings to improve material and operational design and to develop novel processes for more sustainable water purification, harvest, and utilization.
