Timeline of Capacitive Deionization: The Path to a New Era

Abstract

Capacitive deionization (CDI) is defined as an electrochemical methodology for separating charged species from solution using porous electrodes. Over recent decades, CDI has received more and more attention and interest from industry and academia owing to its advantageous features of energy saving, ease of operation, etc. There has been much progress achieved which has promoted the development of CDI to a new stage. In this chapter, we review the recent development of CDI in terms of evaluation metrics, electrode materials, and cell architecture design. It is believed that CDI will still be a promising option as an interfacial electrochemical methodology for applications in not only water desalination, but also organic pollution control, rare metal recovery, gas separation/capture, etc.