Research Overview
This research area develops TEA and optimization frameworks to support the design, scale-up, and deployment of separation processes across water and energy applications. Our methods integrate process-level physics with cost and performance models to identify optimal operating conditions, technology configurations, and investment strategies, with an emphasis on robust operation under variable conditions. Open-source software supports rigorous trade-off analysis and comparison of emerging technologies against conventional processes, lowering barriers for practitioners and researchers. Case studies span seawater and brackish water desalination, water reuse, industrial wastewater recovery, critical mineral extraction, and energy-sector separations, with ongoing work extending TEA frameworks to capture uncertainty in energy prices, material costs, and regulatory constraints.
Projects
Team Members
Overview
Municipal and industrial water treatment facilities face increasingly complex technology decisions for treating nontraditional waters, water reuse, and resource recovery. Current tools provide limited capability to rigorously compare alternatives, predict performance under variable conditions, or justify R&D and pilot investments. This results in conservative design decisions, costly and time-intensive piloting programs, and missed opportunities for innovation. WaterTAP is an open-source, physics-based modeling framework for designing and evaluating advanced water treatment systems. WaterTAP process models are built within an optimization framework to solve for cost-optimal design and operation. WaterTAP enables researchers and engineers to simulate complex treatment trains; screen and prioritize technologies for piloting; integrate facility data into predictive models; and quantify the value of innovation.
Links
Supported By
- National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI)
Team Members
Overview
Critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements are essential to the energy transition, yet current supply chains are geographically concentrated, environmentally costly, and vulnerable to market fluctuations. Our group develops techno-economic models to evaluate both conventional and emerging extraction pathways for these materials. A core focus is lithium extraction, where we compare the cost, energy intensity, and scalability of conventional evaporation-pond brine processing against direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies for unconventional brine sources such as geothermal brines. As part of this effort, we partner with teams developing electrodialysis-based lithium extraction technologies under separate DOE-funded projects, evaluating their techno-economic performance and scale-up potential relative to conventional and other DLE approaches. We also contribute to the HERMES consortium (Hastening the Exploration & Recovery of Minerals from Earth Energy Systems), an initiative to quantify the potential value of critical minerals contained in waste resources across the United States in diverse resource and market combinations, including coal refuse, coal ash, mine tailings, acid mine drainage, and red mud. Working alongside our colleagues in the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and six other national labs, we model and evaluate production processes and their costs, integrating AI and data-driven methods, with the broader goal of identifying which waste-to-mineral pathways are worth pursuing at scale.
Supported By
- Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy
- Stanford Sustainability Accelerator
- Department of Energy - Critical Minerals Innovation Hub
Team Members
Overview
Desalination at inland brackish groundwater treatment plants is currently limited by high costs of concentrate management and disposal. With current methods, 5-25% of the feed is disposed of as concentrate, with 98% of disposal using conventional methods (i.e. no byproduct recovery). The levelized cost of water (LCOW) for current plants in operation ranges from $0.42-1.5/m3. This project aims to assess the technical and economic feasibility of industrial ecosystems to desalinate brackish groundwater and supply existing and potential markets for clean concentrate or other bulk constituents from the brine. Specific project goals include: 1) Developing location specific byproduct revenue models using market assessments, and 2) Creating treatment train schemas in WaterTAP for treatment and valorization of brackish groundwater and establish pipe parity cost and performance targets for brackish groundwater treatment.
Links
Supported By
- National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI)
Recent Publications
- Incorporating corrosion design constraints in desalination process optimization: A case study in mechanical vapor compression Carson I. Tucker, O. Amusat, A. Atia, Alexander V. Dudchenko, Timothy V. Bartholomew, Meagan S. Mauter. Desalination, 2026. 10.1016/j.desal.2025.119698
- Component innovations for lower cost mechanical vapor compression. Carson I. Tucker, Timothy V. Bartholomew, A. Dudchenko, M. Mauter. Water research, 2024. 10.1016/j.watres.2024.121950
- Optimizing Desalination Operations for Energy Flexibility Akshay K. Rao, A. Atia, Bernard Knueven, M. Mauter. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 2024. 10.1021/acssuschemeng.4c06353
- Novel Method for Accurately Estimating Membrane Transport Properties and Mass Transfer Coefficients in Reverse Osmosis Yuanzhe Liang, A. Dudchenko, M. Mauter. SSRN Electronic Journal, 2023. 10.2139/ssrn.4349423
- Desalination Process Design Assisted by Osmotic Power for High Water Recovery and Low Energy Consumption K. Touati, A. Dudchenko, M. Mauter, Md. Saifur Rahaman. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 2022. 10.1021/acssuschemeng.1c07078.s001