2022 Annual Meeting
Separation of Urea from Aqueous Solutions
Chronic kidney disease is on the rise in the United States. It is estimated 1 in 7 Americans have some form of chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to the NIH. Common dialysis techniques remove waste products via diffusion. The dialysate stream that removes waste from the blood is rejected from the system and requires constant input. A mobile artificial kidney device faces the challenge of solving the need for the constant addition of dialysate. The reverse osmosis (RO) module in the device is needed to modulate the excretion of water which suffers from a high urea permeability. One solution is to use membrane distillation (MD) that has shown to be capable of removing urea to a reasonable degree. However, the advantage of RO is the simplicity of operation. MD is more complex in the design, but with the advantage of a potentially higher degree of separation. This poster will look at the advantages of both technologies and discuss ways of improving urea removal in an artificial kidney device.