Numerical study on osmotic power generation by reverse electrodialysis in a nanochannel with randomly varied cross-sections

As a clean energy source, salinity gradient energy has received significant attention from researchers and been developing rapidly in recent decades. Due to its higher power generation efficiency compared to traditional Reverse Electrodialysis (RED), a large number of studies have been conducted on nanofluidic RED (NRED). This paper investigates the effects of various properties of irregular nanochannels, whose cross-sectional area randomly varies along the length direction, on the energy conversion performance. By comparing with straight channels of equal diameter, the energy conversion performance is significantly influenced by the tortuosity of the irregular nanochannels due to the varied ion selectivity.