서강대학교

초록/요약

As the world energy demand increases, some developed countries’ governments have set their energy policy to fossil fuel phase-out. Although there is a long way to go, the investment for renewable energy has renewed its size every year. Salinity gradient Energy (SGE) has recently drawn attention as one of green energies that can support the world energy consumption. Reverse electrodialysis (RED) is one of SGE technologies that can harness a concentration difference by using ion exchange membranes. Though the RED has an advantage of using natural resources such as river and seawater, it hasn’t been commercialized yet due to fouling of expensive ion exchange membranes. By using thermolytic solute, which can be decomposed at low-level heat, the fouling level might significantly be reduced by operating the RED system as a closed-loop. Additionally, they have several cost benefits when compared with open-loop RED with seawater and river water, such as no need of repetitive pretreatment and removal of locational constraints. This study is about the RED using ammonium bicarbonate (NH4HCO3), one of the promising solutes for the closed-loop RED, whose ionization has not been clarified. We presents the evaluation of various parameters on the performance of NH4HCO3-RED system and the development of modeling of NH4HCO3-RED system for easy estimation of the performance. We hope that this study can improve our understanding of the NH4HCO3-RED system and contribute to relevant modeling studies, using NH4HCO3 or some other compounds, for generating higher energy densities.