Introduction
The availability of affordable clean water is one of the key technological, social, and economical
challenges of the 21st century. Clean water, acknowledged as a basic human right by the United Na-
tions
[1]
, is still unavailable to one out of seven people worldwide. To complicate matters, increasing
groundwater extraction around the globe results in progressive salt water ingress in wells and aqui-
fers. As a consequence, there is a large interest in the development of economically attractive desali-
nation technologies. Over the years, a number of desalination methods have been developed among
which distillation, reverse osmosis, and electrodialysis are the most commonly known and wide-
spread technologies
[2]
. A common goal for current research is to make these technologies more
energy efficient and cost effective, both for the deionization of seawater and for brackish water.