Microfluidic Desalination: A New Era Towards Sustainable Water Resources

Water desalination is considered one of the most critical separation technologies that suffer from several drawbacks, such as the power consumption that controls the separation efficiency. Microfluidics technology provided a unique opportunity to introduce cutting edge products and to re‐visit existing technologies like desalination for evaluation, optimization, and new product introduction purposes. It is believed that the micro‐mixing and micro‐separation features in a microfluidic flow system will contribute significantly to enhance the desalination performance of known desalination techniques. Micro‐mixing and micro‐separation in a microfluidic device can eliminate the poor mixing and separation efficiency observed with the bench‐scaled systems due to the high‐precision droplet generation and microfluidic separation features. This review discusses the current state of microfluidic desalination, its operating theory, and its limitations. Additionally, the current technology is reviewed to shed some light on the feasibility of scaling up water production rates. The gap between the application of microfluidic desalination and industrial scale‐up is also described briefly. The rapid development of microfluidic technology in the past few decades introduced a unique opportunity to revisit many conventional techniques for scaling‐down and optimization purposes. Microfluidic water desalination is a new promising scale‐down approach to develop portable desalination devices that can be used by individuals with minimum power consumption and manufacturing costs.