I have one more lingering criticism that I don’t think they addressed (I reread it twice).
What happens to the salt after it’s removed? If they don’t have a filter, where does it go? Do they pump brine water back?
This particular passage is suggestive of their device being more efficient than RO at small scales, although no figures are given for comparison:
> Commercially available portable desalination units typically require high-pressure pumps to push water through filters, which are very difficult to miniaturize without compromising the energy-efficiency of the device, explains Yoon.
Sure, that might be boring for some readers but they could throw a couple of sentences about it at the bottom.
I thought the metal plates were collecting the salt but the article and video don’t make it clear.
Some comment in the article left me thinking they end up trapping them in the media and have to reverse charge to release them so I assume it would operate pulsed and presumably have a valve to dump the output during regen.
Though I'm a little confused in that normally CEDI is used after RO because the CEDI media is pretty sensitive to fouling and also doesn't work well when the water conductivity is highly variable. Maybe they solve the fouling with charge reversal.
...who knows, because popular coverage of this stuff never hits on the important parts and almost never links the relevant publications. There are many ways to make drinkable water from seawater-- making them some useful mixture of energy efficient, cost effective, portable, waste-water efficient, and reliable is the actual hard part.
And I agree, at ounces per hour there's no need to dilute the brine, just dumping it is fine.