Data underlying the publication: On-site affordable acid and base production from seawater using bipolar membrane electrodialysis: ion transport and polyelectrolyte multilayer coating

This dataset was collected at the Laboratory of Environmental Technology, Wageningen University & Research in 2024/2025. It is supplementary data for the PhD thesis of A.A.E. Elozeiri and the publication of " On-site affordable acid and base production from seawater using bipolar membrane electrodialysis: ion transport and polyelectrolyte multilayer coating".
We investigated the direct use of seawater in a bipolar membrane electrodialysis (BMED) process to produce acids and bases. The current and energy efficiency of a bipolar membrane electrodialysis stack were analyzed, where the starting salt stream was 0.5 M NaCl or synthetic seawater. Moreover, the current-voltage responses of the used membranes were characterized in a 6-compartment electrodialysis cell via cyclic voltammetry. Using synthetic seawater as the salt stream in a conventional BMED stack resulted in inorganic scaling inside the BMED stack. To mitigate the inorganic scaling, we coated the cation-exchange membranes with a polyelectrolyte multilayer (i.e., PAH/PSS) to limit the transport of multivalent cations from the salt to the base compartment.
This research was performed within the framework of the research program AquaConnect, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO, grant-ID P19-45) and public and private partners of the AquaConnect consortium and coordinated by Wageningen University and Research.