Order-of-magnitude enhancement in boron removal by membrane-free capacitive deionization

Increasing global water stress motivates a growing interest in seawater desalination by reverse osmosis. Boron is typically weakly removed by reverse osmosis membranes at seawater pH, necessitating expensive post-processes such as caustic agent dosing of the permeate followed by additional filtration steps. It has been previously demonstrated that membraneless capacitive deionization can enable chemical-free boron removal from reverse osmosis permeate, with basic design rules established. However, the level of boron electrosorption per cell charge was limited to ∼0.5 µmol/g, a level too low for practical applications. We here explore, both theoretically and experimentally, methods to enhance boron removal by capacitive deionization. We found that reversing the polarity of the applied voltage during the discharge step resulted in an order of magnitude increase in boron electrosorption to nearly 4 µmol/g with promising energy consumption of 0.2 kW⋅h/m³. The promise of these results is highlighted when compared with recently-developed boron electrosorption cells requiring bipolar membranes, which demonstrate similar boron removal of 4.35 µmol/g but with much higher energy consumption of 18.3 kW⋅h/m³ while incurring significant membrane costs. Overall, we demonstrate for the first time that membrane- and chemical-free electrochemical technologies can remove sufficient boron from RO permeate in a single pass, significantly enhancing its potential to provide energy- and cost-efficient boron removal.