Nano-Enabled Water Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges

Ensuring reliable access to clean and affordable water is one of the greatest global challenges of this century. Overcoming this challenge requires new resource management approaches and technological reform. Nanotechnology offers significant opportunities to revolutionize approaches towards sustainable and energy efficient drinking water production and wastewater reuse. The unique and highly tunable properties that arise at the nano-scale (high surface area, selective surface reactivity, surface catalysis, etc.) of nanomaterials have led to innovations and fueled advances in many water technologies in the past decade.

The aim of the KAUST Research Conference: Nano-Enabled Water Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges is to highlight the role of nano as an enabler towards energy efficient clean water production and to discuss the challenges in the path forward. The conference will cover the topics on fundamentals, applications, and scaling up of the nano-enabled water technologies as related to ongoing research at the Water Desalination and Reuse Center (WDRC) and KAUST as a whole.

The topics to be discussed at this conference are: 

1. Nano-Enabled Water Technologies: Overview and Saudi Perspective

2. Emerging polymeric membranes for water applications

3. Nanocomposite membranes and 2D materials for water desalination and purification

4. Nanomaterials for water treatment and monitoring

5. Nano for food, agriculture and resource recovery

The Conference is organized by the Water Desalination and Reuse Center, with financial support from the King Abdullah University of  Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research (OSR).