Ion exchange chromatography 'a good desalination technology'

Ion exchange chromatography (IC) has been highlighted as an excellent way of desalinating salty or brackish water, it has been claimed.

Writing for WaterWorld, Lipika Basumallick, Deanna Hurum and Jeff Rohrer said removing the salt from H20 offers an "attractive" option for producing the quantities needed for irrigation and drinking requirements.

"An IC method has been developed that uses anion-exchange and cation-exchange columns and suppressed conductivity detection to simultaneously measure the common anions and cations in water samples obtained from desalination processes," they explained.

According to the experts, cation separations and electrolytically generated eluents utilise a 3mm column format in this process, while a 2mm column approach is used for anion separations.

This enables desalination plants to monitor a number of matrices ranging between seawater and drinking water.

Recent statistics by GBI Research predicted the global desalination market will expand at a cumulative average growth rate of around 10.5 per cent between 2010-20.