Print Email Facebook Twitter Microbial Desalination Title Microbial Desalination: An exploratory research to assess the potential of desalination by microbial methods Author Meerstadt, Charlotte (TU Delft Civil Engineering and Geosciences) Contributor de Kreuk, M.K. (graduation committee) Weissbrodt, D.G. (mentor) Heijman, Sebastiaan (graduation committee) Cerruti, M. (graduation committee) Degree granting institution Delft University of Technology Programme Civil Engineering | Environmental Engineering Date 2019-05-17 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 secondresearch 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. Subject DesalinationBiotechnologyFeasibility assessmentMolecular biologyBatch experimentInnovation To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:09a8891f-0601-427b-8649-c6223b365f8e Embargo date 2020-06-01 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights © 2019 Charlotte Meerstadt Files PDF MSc_Thesis_CJMeerstadt.pdf 107.73 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:09a8891f-0601-427b-8649-c6223b365f8e/datastream/OBJ/view