Nature Middle East | House of Wisdom

KAUST researchers win top places in contest to combat desertification

Two research teams from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) win the first and second place in the international  “Help to Avoid Desertification” idea contest, sponsored by Bayers MaterialScience.

The two winners, KAUST PhD candidate Noura Shehab and a team led by Rodrigo Valladares Linares and Muhannad Abu-Ghdaib, both come KAUST’s Water Desalination and Reuse Center (WDRC). They have staved off competition from 87 other entrants to win first and second places for their innovative proposals, receiving €7,000 and €4,000 respectively.

“The researchers submitting the winning entries are among a talented group in the WDRC working on sustainable solutions to national, regional, and global water scarcity, of which desertification is a manifestation,” said Gary Amy, director of WDRC.

Saudi Arabia, which is mostly made up on arid deserts, produces some 24 million cubic meters of water per day from desalination, about half the world’s total. Desalination is, however, an energy intensive and expensive process. While the Kingdom is rich in oil, both winners’ proposals focused on using renewable sources of energy to produce water from desalination cheaply and more environment friendly.

Shehab, who won first place, proposed turning to the natural resources of sun, sand and wastewater to counteract the effects of desertification through a three step process.

Building on existing research, the first step will use bacteria as a source of renewable energy. Besides the actually process of removing salt from the water, an electric current produced from the bacteria will pass through the water to degrade any organic matter. This is more sustainable than using oil or gas for electricity production.

The second step involves passing the desalinated effluent through a sustainable biosand filtration system for drinking water and irrigation. The final step involves using thermal energy from Sun rays for disinfection of the water, making it ready for drinking or irrigation.

The team led by Valladares Linares and Abu-Ghdaib, which won second place at the contest, are also proposing ways to reduce the energy cost of desalination. Instead of the traditional high-energy filteration systems that use reverse osmosis or nanofiltration, the team want to make a hybrid membrane system combining the use of forward osmosis and low-pressure reverse osmosis (FO/LPRO).

By using the natural process of forward osmosis as the main force to separate water from the dissolved salts, they do not need to use the expensive hydraulic pressure-driven separation options.

The water is then passed through a low-pressure reverse osmosis pressure as a second barrier against micro-pollutants. The result is the production of high quality water at a low energy input.

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