Capacitive deionization (CDI) process is an emerging process for water desalination. Recently, there has been a major development of architectures in CDI cells using carbon flow electrodes with membrane, called flow-electrode capacitive deionization (FCDI). In FCDI, the advantage is continuous desalination due to the carbon flow electrodes. Numerous research groups dedicated to develop the FCDI process, however, a clear pre-treatment of carbon flow electrodes was not suggested. Study herein, present a clear understanding of effects of pre-treatment of activated carbon based on sonication in the carbon flow electrodes for the basics results with respect to adsorption performance.

Forward Osmosis process has no, as yet, reliable method to predict fouling. This study utilized the concept of fouling reversibility to develop the index. The osmotically-driven reversibility index, denoted as ORI, was acquired by measuring the flux recovery after physical cleaning cycle and the protocols of ORI were developed systematically by considering all the critical factors of FO process. The applicability of ORI was examined by investigating FO process when treating secondary effluents from various full-scale wastewater treatment plants. The results demonstrated that the normalized final flux by fouling in FO was closely correlated to the ORI measurements with high statistical reliability. The ORI has proven to be useful evaluation parameter for continuous operation and determining cleaning cycles of FO process.