Ruikun Xin

Ph.D. student, 2018-present

M.S. Carnegie Mellon University, 2017

ruikun.xin@rice.edu

I am from Beijing, China. I did my undergraduate in Environmental Sciences at the University of Iowa where I learned the importance of wastewater treatment. I recently finished my M.S. study in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where I investigated heat transfer in direct contact membrane distillation systems. Currently, at Rice University my research goals are to develop a nanocomposite membrane for dual energy source membrane distillation (DESMD) to efficiently recover freshwater from reverse osmosis (RO) or nanofiltration (NF) concentrate, and design a novel membrane module for DESMD processes. The nanocomposite membrane will allow solarthermal and electric resistive heating directly at the membrane surface, which reverses temperature polarization and enhances energy efficiency of MD process.