Electrochemical Desalination for a Sustainable Water Future

We present an introduction to the broad field of desalination by providing a brief review of modern thermal, membrane, and electrochemical technologies. However, the main focus of this article is to introduce a fundamentally new and potentially powerful electrochemical approach to desalination: electrochemically mediated desalination (EMD). EMD is a membrane-less desalination method that uses a simple power supply to oxidize a small fraction of the chloride ions present in seawater. This results in the generation of a local electric field gradient, which consequently separates ions to produce partially desalted water.