science and technology studies literature review

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World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development

ISSN : 2042-5945

Article publication date: 1 March 2013

The paper aims to explore and identify the contributions to the literature available about trends in science and technology research at various levels.

Design/methodology/approach

A deep scan of literature was carried out in an attempt to identify considerable works that have been published concerning various facets related to science and technology research. Varied search terms like “research”, “research and research output”, “science and technology research”, “research collaboration”, “research in universities”, “importance of science and technology research”, “issues in research”, etc. were used for retrieving the literature from a range of online scholarly databases, search engines and allied web sources.

The literature review reveals that a considerable amount of literature has been published related to science and technology research. However, keeping in view immense advancements and innovations in science and technology, scholarly output is still in its emergent phase.

Practical implications

It is apparent from the study of existing literature that there is still vast scope for advanced exploration on the topic and the study paves the way for the concerned organizations and institutions (like universities, libraries and publishers) at national and international level to take substantial measures to boost research in the field of science and technology.

Originality/value

The paper is the first ordered and makes an endeavour to review the literature and provides a summary of emerging trends in science and technology research.

• Science and technology research
• Collaborative research
• University research
• Research issues
• Research work
• Research methods

Akhtar Khan, N. , Jan, S. and Amin, I. (2013), "Trends in science and technology research: literature review", World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development , Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 168-178. https://doi.org/10.1108/WJSTSD-04-2013-0021

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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13 A Field of Its Own: The Emergence of Science and Technology Studies

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

• Published: 06 March 2017
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This chapter presents science and technology studies (STS) as a new island in a preexisting disciplinary archipelago. As a field, STS combines two strands of work dealing, respectively, with the nature and practices of science and technology (S&T) and the relationships between science, technology, and society. As such, STS research focuses on distinctive objects of inquiry and employs novel discourses and methods. The field confronts three significant barriers to achieving greater intellectual coherence, and institutional recognition. First, it must persuade skeptical scientists and university administrators of the need for a critical perspective on S&T. Second, it must demonstrate that traditional disciplines do not adequately analyze S&T. Third, it has to overcome STS scholars’ reluctance to create intellectual boundaries and membership criteria that appear to exclude innovative work. A generation of scholars with graduate degrees in STS are helping to meet these challenges.

In 2001, science and technology studies (STS) made an appearance as a card-carrying field in the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences or IESBS ( Smelser & Baltes 2001 ). This validated years of effort by many scholars to establish the social studies of science and technology as a recognized, and recognizable, domain of intellectual activity. As a member of that network and as the editor of the IESBS section on STS, I was understandably elated, even though putting the section together entailed many difficult and unforeseen choices of what to include or exclude in defining the field. 1 Even then, STS was not counted as a discipline, a label reserved for fields with well-established, one-word names (e.g., anthropology, economics, history, law, philosophy), and for branches of psychology. Instead, STS was classified as an “intersecting field,” a rubric shared with a cluster of relatively recent, amorphous, and ill-assorted domains of study such as genetics and society, gender studies, religious studies, and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. Unlike media studies or public policy however, STS was not demoted to the status of “application.” It took its place in the roster of the social sciences as a well-demarcated territory on the map of knowledge.

This review asks what major contributions STS has made to research and teaching, and what have been its principal successes and failures inside and outside academia. How does the future look for STS? Responses to these questions help shed light on the meanings and challenges of interdisciplinarity, illuminating the potential that spaces between disciplines offer for novel constellations of inquiry to enhance human self-awareness, social understanding, and public action. At the same time, the track record of STS shows how difficult it is to populate those in-between spaces with well-trained scholars, new curricular offerings, and long-term research programs. At the heart of the story are questions about the capacity of STS to overcome entrenched status differentials among disciplines, especially between the humanistic social sciences and the powerful enterprises of university-based science, medicine, and engineering.

13.1 An Interdisciplinary History

At the risk of oversimplification, and of flattening important cross-cultural differences, STS can be seen as a merger of two broad streams of mid-twentieth-century scholarship. 2 One looks at the nature and practices of science and technology (S&T) as social institutions possessing distinctive normative commitments, structures, practices, and discourses that nevertheless change over time and vary across cultural contexts. The other is mainly concerned with the impacts and control of science, and even more of technology, with particular focus on the risks that S&T pose to human values such as health and safety, peace, security, privacy, community, democracy, development, and environmental sustainability. The consolidation of STS at the beginning of the twenty-first century is largely a consequence of these once-discrete lines of concern coming together around a shared core of theoretical orientations, research methods, texts, and topics, undergirded by new professional infrastructures (e.g., programs, departments, textbooks, journals, societies). Thus, STS is the product of decades of effort by people who perceived important gaps in the academic analysis of S&T, and who gradually, painstakingly, and with mixed success built institutional foundations to support the missing research and teaching.

The resulting field is interdisciplinary in a sense that can best be captured through a cartographic metaphor. Underlying the idea of interdisciplinarity are two ideal-typical maps of preexisting disciplines. In one, all the disciplines are tightly lined up, one against another, as in a map of the contiguous United States, with shared boundaries and no gaps between; in the other, as in a map of the Indonesian archipelago, the disciplines are idiosyncratically bounded islands, scattered across a sea of ignorance, with unexplored waters in between. 3 On the first map, a new “interdiscipline” comes into being principally through exchanges among scholars belonging to one or another established disciplinary community and trained in its forms of reasoning and research practices. On the second, an “ inter discipline” is literally that—an autonomous formation situated among other disciplines. Such a field may arise in response to new concerns in society, such as the pervasive sense of uncertainty that propelled Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society to unexpected popularity in the wake of the Chernobyl accident ( Beck 1992 ). Exploration of novel topics, prompting theoretical and methodological innovation, can coalesce into a new culture of knowledge making with its own native habits of production and exchange. Science and technology studies looks more like the latter than the former: less a program of interstate highway construction among existing states than an attempt to chart new territories among islands of disciplined thought in the high seas of the unknown.

13.1.1 The Nature and Practices of Science and Technology

From the interwar period to the start of the Cold War, sociologists and historians, and not infrequently scientists, engineers, and social activists, became interested in the relationship between scientific practice and its work products. Thomas Kuhn’s hugely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a well-known example ( Kuhn 1962 ). Kuhn’s work helped turn scholarly attention away from the theoretical content and coherence of scientific claims to the social means of their production. His book helped crystallize a new approach to the history of science in which scientific facts were seen as products of scientists’ communal knowledge-generating efforts, conditioned by specific contexts of discovery. This shift led to an effort by a group of mainly British scholars to probe how far questions about the nature of science once asked mainly by philosophers could be productively reframed as questions about how science works ( Bloor 1976 ). Their inquiries produced a distinctive school of “sociology of scientific knowledge” (SSK) 4 located in centers for “science studies” at a number of UK universities, including Edinburgh and Bath, in the 1970s. The aim of SSK was more imperial than interdisciplinary: It was to render social what had previously been seen as mainly epistemic (how scientists think); it was to appropriate for the qualitative and interpretive social sciences what had once belonged to philosophy (by asking what scientists do, how they do it, and how their work achieves authority).

While SSK was emerging from struggles between philosophy and sociology of science, scholars from other backgrounds recognized the value of ethnographic methods for studying scientists at work. An early, influential exemplar of this approach was the 1979 book by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts ; the word “social” was dropped from the 1986 edition. In this and subsequent writing, Latour urged students of science to “follow the scientist” if they wished to understand how observations in the lab or the field turn into facts ( Latour 1987 ). Participant-observation proved a useful tool for exploring the cultural dynamics of different scientific disciplines (physics, molecular biology, genomics, climate modeling) and organizations (“big science,” university laboratories, interdisciplinary research centers). Latour, together with his colleague Michel Callon, a sociologist of technology and, later, the market in the Paris-based school of STS, also produced important works on the relations between the human and nonhuman or the social and material elements of S&T. Their “actor-network theory” (ANT), which urges symmetrical treatment of human and nonhuman agents, known as “actants,” emerged as another salient direction in STS research. By highlighting the material elements of knowledge networks, ANT foregrounded technology as an increasingly more significant object of STS study.

A third important research tradition looked at science and technology as distinctive cultural formations. Engaging anthropologists, feminists, postcolonial scholars, discourse analysts, and other theorists of language and power, this body of work crossed the line between the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in its preoccupation with the meanings people attach to the products of S&T. In works such as Donna Haraway’s (1989) investigations of primatology or Evelyn Fox Keller’s (1986) studies on gender and science, cultural studies of science and technology questioned how social power translates into scientific authority and vice versa. A flourishing body of scholarship emerged around medical S&T, focusing on such topics as reproductive medicine, patient activism, and hereditary disease; unlike classical studies of the physical sciences and technologies, these more human-centered investigations emphasized themes of identity and subjectivity, especially of those affected by disease classifications. More generally, an influx of research funds from the Human Genome Project spurred broad-based exploration of the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics and genomics, contributing new normative dimensions to cultural studies of the life sciences and technologies. Less common but equally agenda-setting was work on the relations between science and other powerful institutions, such as law, politics, and religion; these works highlighted the impact of cultural norms of legitimacy and reasonableness on the production and reception of policy-relevant scientific facts (Jasanoff 1990 , 2005 ).

13.1.2 The Invention of Technoscience

Unlike historians of science and of technology, who maintain separate identities through professional training and associations, STS scholars made a point of integrating their studies of scientific discovery with analyses of the technological systems that support or result from advances in science. The term “technoscience,” widely used in STS research and the name of the newsletter issued by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), signals a deep commitment to the view that S&T are inextricably intertwined. STS scholarship asserts that technological innovation would not be possible without scientific problem-solving; in reverse, scientific discovery could not proceed without technologies to enable new experimental methods and approaches. Accordingly, in studying high-energy physics or molecular biology, bakelite or musical synthesizers, stem cells or Golden Rice, the Internet or the human genome, STS researchers pay particular attention to the interplay of ideas, instruments, and materials in the practices of the discoverers, inventors, and users of S&T. By using the term “technoscience,” the field draws its own distinctive boundaries around the subject matter it investigates.

The third handbook of STS sponsored by the Society for Social Studies of Science, one of the field’s major professional societies ( Hackett et al. 2007 ; for an earlier survey of the field, see Jasanoff et al. 1995 ) is illustrative. The handbook’s final section, headed “Emergent Technosciences,” deals with systems that cross the lines between the cognitive and the material as well as the natural and the social. This section includes articles on genomics, medical biotechnologies, finance, environment, communications, and nanotechnology. All are areas in which scientific and technological breakthroughs are intimately connected, conform to no straightforward temporal or causal relationships, and depend on multifaceted engagement by actors ranging from individual discoverers, inventors, and entrepreneurs to expert communities, economic sponsors, policy makers, and consuming (or sometimes resisting) publics.

13.1.3 Impacts and Control of Science and Technology

The second major thrust within STS derives from scientists’—and increasingly citizens’ and social movements’—concerns about the impacts of S&T developments on health, safety, and fundamental human values. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the ensuing nuclear arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union initiated a new politics of technological anxiety. Themes of scientists’ complicity in war and violence, and technology’s lack of democratic accountability, grew in prominence during the Vietnam War, which also helped link earlier worries about the ungovernability of science with nascent concerns about S&T’s environmental implications. The marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (Carson 1962) , an attack on indiscriminate chemical use widely credited with launching the modern US environmental movement, appeared in the same year as Kuhn’s book on scientific revolutions. More recently, genetic, information, neuro-, and nanotechnologies, and their rapid convergence in areas such as synthetic biology, have aroused new fears about risks to individuals and society. Observers question whether the benefits of these promising developments might be offset by erosions of liberty, privacy, autonomy, equality, and other cherished liberal ideals. At the limit, questions have arisen about assaults on human nature itself, with the ascendance of the computer and associated forms of standardization and control into intimate bodily functions, social relationships, and autonomy of will and thought. Increasingly, too, the consequences of global imbalances in S&T innovation, and their implications for human rights and social justice, have emerged as centers of gravity for STS scholarship and cross-national collaboration.

In the late 1960s, several US universities, including Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Penn State, and Stanford, reacted to these developments by forming programs in “science, technology, and society” (also abbreviated as STS). Founded, and often led, by senior scientists or engineers—experienced in science advice and policy formation, these programs presumed that STS work had to be cross-disciplinary in the sense of highway-building described above, engaging natural scientists and engineers, as well as humanists, social scientists, and practitioners in law, business, and public policy. Preoccupied with social problem-solving, the founders of US STS programs presumed that good STS research demanded familiarity with the technical content of S&T. This meant in turn that early contributions to research and teaching were made by scientists (or ex-scientists) and engineers, or by teams that included technically trained researchers. Humanists and social scientists were tacitly assumed to have no significant independent insights into the functioning of S&T, although their participation was considered essential for illuminating the “soft,” value-laden, societal dimensions of S&T. Cornell’s STS program provides a small marker of these attitudes and assumptions. It was established in 1969 by a chemist (Franklin Long), a physicist (Raymond Bowers), a biologist (Richard D. O’Brien), and a philosopher of language and mathematics (Max Black).

The prominent role of scientists and engineers helped establish the credibility of STS research in its early years, but it also introduced several constraints: emphasis on empirical case studies rather than social theory; reaffirmation of scientists’ necessarily partial perceptions about the cultures and practices of S&T; reliance on anecdotal practitioner narratives rather than systematic research to explain science-technology-society relationships; and acceptance of public “scientific illiteracy” as the favored explanation for popular concerns about S&T. The topics treated by first-generation STS scholars also reflected some of these limitations. Case studies of the public controversies of the day (airports, nuclear power, supersonic transport, vaccines, environmental pollution) took center stage, with results sometimes indistinguishable from robust journalism. More problematically, such research failed to win the interest of major scholars in established humanistic or social scientific disciplines, and many STS programs in the United States, such as Harvard’s and Cornell’s, either died a quiet death or substantially lost momentum by the mid-1970s.

One should note too that STS scholars in the 1970s drew on fairly conventional social theory to explain why science became political—for example, attributing technical controversies to differences in participants’ taken-for-granted interests; hence they neither drew on nor contributed to seminal insights in other fields. At a time when many social sciences were turning to quantitative methods and rational choice theory, it was easy to dismiss qualitative, case-specific STS findings as merely anecdotal or subjective. Unlike the scholars preoccupied with the practices of scientists, however, researchers focusing on the impact and control of S&T were drawn from the first to issues of power and governance. Their work highlighted how dominant processes of technical decision-making tended to marginalize weaker social groups; neo-Marxist theorists tied these dynamics to class, capital, and hegemonic beliefs, whereas feminists argued that gendered power structures drove developments in S&T. In these respects, even first-generation STS research shared significant concerns with later sociocultural studies of S&T. Openings existed for a productive synthesis, which began in the United States in the late 1980s under the increasingly common rubric of “science and technology studies.”

13.1.4 Common Ground

Convergence between the two major precursors of contemporary STS—work on the nature of scientific production and on the impacts of S&T—occurred on both intellectual and institutional levels. Maturing research programs brought scattered projects and practitioners into closer communion and helped define common theoretical approaches and topical interests. In brief, research on the nature of science became more concerned with how social understandings or arrangements are taken up into the production of knowledge and artifacts, while research on the impacts of S&T recognized that the interactions of science and society begin long before the material products of technology enter the market and affect lives. As a result, the power of S&T was no longer seen as wholly separable from other kinds of power. Nor were the formation and application of knowledge considered entirely distinct from their eventual uses and impacts. Thus, the ways in which science’s epistemic authority interpenetrates other kinds of social and psychological authority emerged as a major thread in the field’s evolving agenda of inquiry.

By the end of the 1990s, a new generation of STS scholars began examining issues such as the following: the nature of expertise in various historical periods and cultural settings; the resources used to forge agreement on “facts”; the relationship between scientific representations and wider visual culture; the disciplining effects of instruments, measuring techniques, and administrative routines; the use of nonhuman agents, including model lab organisms such as flies or mice, in the work of science; the methods of maintaining or challenging boundaries between scientific, technological, and other cultural practices; and the intermingling of expert and lay cultures around such issues as genetic disease. The field’s long-standing concerns with fact, truth, and method did not vanish, but they “thickened” to include a new preoccupation with how novel ideas, entities, and belief systems appear and make their way in the world (and how old ones die out). More than simply accounting for “truth,” STS became concerned with the social dimensions of the accreditation and diffusion of knowledge and its technological manifestations. There was also growing interest among STS scholars of all stripes in examining the relations between scientific and other modes of belief, expression, and power: law, literature, culture, religion, art. Science in non-Western contexts was a relatively late-blooming topic, but was included in the 1995 STS handbook and thereafter grew into a significant focus on global S&T. 5

With all of these projects on the rise, older disciplinary divisions no longer made much sense within STS, particularly in the training of young scholars. For example, since the field’s research questions centered on the nexus of knowledge and power, cutting across historical periods, budding STS scholars saw benefit from exposure to historiography as well as social theory, ethnography as well as metaphysics, and political as well as moral philosophy. The methods used by some of the best-known senior academics in the field were increasingly difficult to localize by discipline. Equally, the work they produced found its way across the field as a whole and into many neighboring disciplines. Science and technology studies books were reviewed in journals running from Science and Nature to the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement , with the whole range of the field’s professional journals between. The unifying feature in all cases was the subject of study, namely, human investments in science and technology.

While many STS researchers could still be characterized as mainly anthropologists, historians, or sociologists, it seemed increasingly more appropriate to distinguish them in relation to their research fields and theoretical commitments. By the early years of the new century, it became less common to find mature STS scholars who defined themselves in terms of a “pure” discipline (history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, politics, economics) applied to a single science or technology (biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, risk analysis). Textbooks introducing students to STS reflected this cross-disciplinary synthesis, although, reflecting the authors’ early disciplinary training, these works approached STS variously from more sociological ( Collins & Pinch 1993 ), anthropological ( Hess 1997 ), or philosophical ( Cutcliffe 2000 ; Sismondo 2010 ) perspectives.

To be sure, there was never a complete integration of assumptions and methods across the spectrum of STS, any more than there is between subfields within most traditional disciplines. Specialties endure and thrive, as in any disciplinary context. For example, boundary-spanning subjects such as risk, scientific evidence, bioethics, or the public understanding of science figure more prominently in the work of STS scholars descended from the tradition of concern with the impacts of science and technology; by contrast, historically or philosophically trained STS researchers have tended to look more at the evolution and practices of disciplinary scientific knowledge and technological communities. By the same token, attention to visual representation and instrumentation, widespread in historical and cultural studies of science, is less common in the work of those with primary interests in the politics of S&T. Ethnographic approaches have been used more often to study lab cultures and patients’ groups than, say, environmental controversies or legal proceedings. More generally, constructivist theories have made greater headway in contemporary than in historical studies of science and technology, possibly because historical methods are poorly adapted to observations of science in the making. Comparable differences of theory, method, research styles, and topical emphasis, however, may be encountered within the most securely established and coherent disciplines.

13.2 Academic Institutionalization

Despite its creativity and originality, the branch of STS concerned with the nature and practices of contemporary S&T was slow to gain a foothold in university structures. In part, this simply reflected the field’s growing pains: At the turn of the twenty-first century, not many senior scholars of unquestioned eminence identified their careers unambiguously with STS. In part, too, the field suffered from the balkanization that sets in when resources are insufficient: Seeing little benefit from self-identification with STS, young scholars often reverted to better-recognized disciplinary affiliations, such as anthropology, history or sociology, or to topical subfields within STS for which there was current market demand, such as bioethics, environmental studies, science policy, or even nanotechnology and society. In turn, such moves hampered the recognition of commonalities that cut across the field, with negative consequences for graduate education, which thrives best in a stable environment of accredited teaching centers and steady job opportunities.

Non-negligibly as well, STS in the 1990s earned a reputation for relativism that evoked scorn from working scientists, other social scientists, and some university administrators. Labeled the “science wars,” a subset of the culture wars then afflicting the universities, those exchanges called into question whether constructivist approaches fairly portray progress in science or advances in technology. Although difficult to document, worries about the field’s intellectual soundness and descriptive accuracy, coming at a time when universities were becoming increasingly dependent on their links to science-based industries, may have inhibited the institutionalization of STS in the upper reaches of academia in several Western countries. The widely decried hostility toward science during the US presidency of George W. Bush, coupled with a growing perception that scientific progress and technological innovation are crucial for economic growth, may also have undermined institutional support for scholarship seen as questioning the authority of science.

Until the late 1980s, graduate studies of the nature and role of science and technology in US universities were mostly organized in one of the following ways: departments or programs in the history (and sometimes philosophy) of science and technology (HPST); programs (occasionally departments) in science, technology, and society (STS); and programs in science, technology, and public policy (STPP). These arrangements reflected a number of tacit intellectual boundaries. Historical and contemporary studies were thought to belong in separate compartments; even at the University of Pennsylvania, where history and sociology of science nominally resided in the same department, the focus remained on social histories of science and medicine. The frequent pairing of history with philosophy of science reflected a union of interests in these fields around the content of scientific ideas. This alliance worked well for “internalist” historians, but less well for those venturing into social and cultural history. Another implicit boundary sequestered studies of science, technology, and public policy within professional schools, as a supposedly “applied” field, away from the more “fundamental” humanities and social sciences (as at Harvard, Michigan, and Wisconsin). So conceived, STPP focused more on specific areas of scientific and technological practice than on broader ways of thinking about the nature of S&T. A few programs and departments did not respect these divisions, but they mostly existed at engineering colleges and technical universities, where they did not compete with traditional disciplines. Members of those programs, too, tended to define themselves as anthropologists, historians, sociologists, or political scientists rather than as representatives of an integrated field of STS.

Two external developments in the mid-1980s helped to partially remap these configurations. First, the processes of global academic exchange brought about closer contact between European and North American scholarship, narrowing the gap between research traditions on the two sides of the Atlantic. Bridges were built between the more structuralist and political approaches to studying S&T in the United States and constructivist and philosophical scholarship in Europe. Second, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) opened a nationwide competition to support interdisciplinary graduate training in STS. This initiative led to the founding of three successive programs in the early 1990s, at the University of California–San Diego (UCSD), Cornell University, and the University of Minnesota. The Cornell grant spurred the establishment in 1991 of a Department of Science and Technology Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Merging the earlier HPST and STS programs, the new department comprised about a dozen faculty members offering both undergraduate and graduate training in STS. By the late 1990s, all three NSF-supported programs were producing doctorates and postdoctoral trainees who entered the academic market and raised the profile of STS.

While such large-scale center awards ended after the first three, the NSF continued to support more modest, research-based graduate training in STS. A series of Small Grants for Training and Research (SGTRs) supported limited numbers of graduate students and postdocs to work on well-defined themes within the field. SGTR recipients in early years included Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Harvard (JFK School), Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Rensselaer Polytechnic. In addition, the NSF supported conferences and workshops designed to promote curricular innovation and theoretical integration under particular thematic headings, such as diversity in science and engineering, or biology and the law. Targeted funding for looking at technology’s social impacts and implications also became available under federally sponsored research programs such as the Human Genome Project and the National Nanotechnology Initiative; parallel initiatives emerged in Europe and (sometimes) East Asia, although with different funding models and implications for student training.

Unlike the earlier STS programs, the new STS maintained strength where it put down solid institutional roots and made gradual inroads elsewhere. Thus, the NSF-funded programs at Cornell, Minnesota, and UCSD added faculty strength over time and, in some cases, branched into new areas of research, such as genomics, information technologies, and nanotechnology. The STS program at MIT, which already controlled its own faculty lines, also grew during this period, partly by adopting a new doctoral program, although the STS faculty remained organized along mostly disciplinary lines with greatest strengths in history and anthropology. STS departments or programs at some prominent technical universities (e.g., Georgia Tech, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Virginia Polytechnic, University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science) made additional professorial appointments. In the midwest, the University of Michigan appointed STS scholars in several departments and created an STS undergraduate certificate program. The University of Wisconsin, home to well-established history of science and history of medicine departments, appointed a cluster of STS scholars and established a graduate certificate program in STS. Similar developments occurred in the University of California system, especially at Berkeley, Davis, and Santa Cruz, during the early years of the twenty-first century. Rapid expansions in research and graduate training at Arizona State University included a build-up of STS scholars and the establishment in 2008 of a doctoral program in the human and social dimensions of science and technology.

Science and technology studies was recognized as a field of graduate training in a number of northern European countries (Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland, United Kingdom) during the 1970s. Subsequently, from the turn of the century, the European Union began supporting a widening network of universities offering a standardized master’s level curriculum in STS, administered through the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands in collaboration with the European Interuniversity Association on Society, Science and Technology. In the same period, the French government added a required component of history and philosophy of science to graduate training in S&T, while other state-funded initiatives looked to strengthen research and training in STS more broadly. Initiatives in Germany included most importantly the STS graduate programs at the University of Bielefeld, a preeminent center for interdisciplinary studies. When STS lost strength at Bielefeld through faculty attrition, research continued in smaller clusters funded by Germany’s “excellence initiative,” as well as programs initiated by institutions such as the Technical University of Munich. Several southern (and eventually eastern) European countries also built strength in STS during the 1990s, usually through professional societies and European research collaborations. Japan formed an STS network of its own in 1990, and by the late 1990s actively participated with China, South Korea, and Taiwan in an East Asian STS network served by its own specialist journal and professional meetings. From the mid-1990s the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences undertook a major effort to publish STS work, often with an emphasis on the impacts and social control of technology.

13.3 Research Frontiers

Interdisciplinary research is often driven by questions that demand input from more than one area of study. Policy research is a prime example: To know how best to control greenhouse emissions from automobiles, one needs to know something about the design of cars, the economics of innovation, the dynamics of the automobile market, the impact of incentives on consumer behavior, and the laws regulating air pollution at state and federal levels. No single field or person possesses all the necessary knowledge; collaboration among disciplinary frameworks and their distinctive knowledge systems—on the model of interstate highway construction—is therefore crucial. Significant developments in STS, however, were driven by questions of a different kind: those that one field sought to appropriate from others, and those that no field had thought to investigate before. In each case, the impetus was to view scientific and technological production as social domains deserving fine-grained study, and thus to bring the full-blown apparatus of social analysis, including interpretive methods, to elucidating those dynamics. The results, in cartographic terms, were consistent with the model of charting the unknown seas to discover new islands of insight and learning.

Published in 2007, the third edition of The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies ran to 1,080 pages, comprising 38 chapters organized under 5 topical headings ( Hackett et al. 2007 ; for comparison, see also the second handbook edited by Jasanoff et al. 1995 ). The 2008 joint meeting of the European and American societies for STS showcased around a thousand presented papers; the 2010 Society for Social Studies of Science meeting, held in Tokyo, featured more than 200 sessions. Clearly, any attempt to characterize the research frontiers represented by all this activity risks simplification to the point of caricature. Nevertheless, some broad strokes may convey the unique nature of STS’s interdisciplinarity.

Some of the earliest foundations for STS were laid, as we have seen, by sociologists and anthropologists who provided minute but eye-opening accounts of the scientific practices that lead to the creation of facts. The resulting genre of laboratory studies remains a staple of STS, but its focus has widened to include many more dimensions of practice than the moments of significant discovery or revolutionary change that concerned early historians of S&T. The conception of science itself expanded to accommodate wider domains of systematic knowledge production and technological uptake, from automobile engineering and weapons development to environmental and financial modeling, the creation of markets and fiscal instruments, and varied indicator systems, such as the metrics used to measure scientific productivity. A second direction was to investigate not just the leading figures associated with breakthroughs and prizes but also the invisible technicians, instrument-makers, nurses, counselors, forensic practitioners, and even patent writers without whose involvement scientific knowledge could not be produced or disseminated beyond the lab or the clinic. A third extension was to pay closer attention to the myriad nonhuman elements that play a part in the discovery process, from mice to microscopes to microarrays.

A more subtle shift occurred as researchers considered not only the production of new knowledge but also its circulation in society. A seminal history of experimental practices in Restoration England by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) called attention to the importance of credibility and witnessing in the spread of experimental science—themes that these and other authors developed in later work. While many STS researchers addressed reception and uptake within expert communities, subsequent work showed that broader social analysis was needed to understand the authority of science in the modern world. Thus, studies of the public understanding of science ( Wynne 1995 ) and science used in public policy (Jasanoff 1990 , 2005 ) followed science out of its contexts of production into contexts of interpretation and use, where science acquired substantial power to shape the directions of human advancement and well-being.

Questions of reception—whether inside or outside the circles of scientific practice—are intimately linked to an abiding STS concern with the relationship between science, power, and politics, especially in democratic societies. Although research in this area has shifted in focus and methodology over more than 40 years, it too provides powerful justification for the acknowledgment of STS as a distinct academic field. Salient insights include the following: Controversies are productive social moments, offering windows on the ambiguity of scientific observations and the possible existence of alternative interpretations; technological systems are agents of governance because, like laws and social norms, they both enable and constrain behavior; S&T policies, in both the public and private sector, build on tacit and inarticulate imaginations of what the public wants or needs; public participation and engagement are essential for ensuring that the imaginations of states and industries are held to critical scrutiny and democratic oversight. Some of these findings are now so taken for granted that they underwrite operational rules of citizen participation in most technologically advanced societies; others are inchoate and remain to be translated into political and administrative action. Science and technology studies scholars have become increasingly involved not only in generating knowledge about the relations between science and politics but also in the translation work needed to convert knowledge to action ( Fisher 2011 ). 6

13.4 Outlook: Barriers and Opportunities

Some 50 years into the life of a new field, and 15 years into a new century, STS remains weakly institutionalized in the upper reaches of global academia. Despite growing attention to the field’s intellectual contributions, there are few full-fledged STS departments in the United States, even fewer in Europe, and barely any in Asia or Latin America. Departments, moreover, tend to cluster in engineering schools and, with few exceptions, have not taken hold in high-prestige research universities, where STS has to compete with long-established social sciences and humanities. Large hurdles remain. These are built into the political economy of the disciplines in contemporary higher education, as well as into STS’s own contradictory self-understandings. Briefly, there are three challenges of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity that STS will have to overcome before it can take its place as a necessary, indeed indispensable, component of higher education: establishing credible relations with its objects of study (S&T); defining its relations to other disciplines; and asserting a stronger sense of its own boundaries and mission. The good news is that STS has the resources to meet all three; the bad news is that STS scholars have not yet chosen as a community systematically to tackle any.

First, STS faces the not inconsiderable difficulties of “studying up”: it presents a classic case of a less established, less accredited field commenting on ones that are far more securely established, generously endowed, and seen as conferring more obvious public benefits. It is well known that such power differentials affect the content and credibility of academic analysis. With respect to science and technology, in particular, practitioners are often skeptical that anyone not trained in a technical field could have legitimate things to say about that field’s workings. Indeed, many of the earliest entrants into STS held postgraduate degrees in science or engineering before becoming professional observers of those fields. Physicists became historians of physics, while biologists took up the historical or sociological study of biology, and engineers became major contributors to the history of technology. Yet, the requirement that one must be formally qualified in a field in order to speak authoritatively about it not only restricts access but also narrows the analyst’s capacity to ask probing questions; an insider perspective develops that neither accommodates nor grasps the benefits of the outsider’s questioning gaze. A consequence of this attitude in early STS work was to pay disproportionate attention to the production of scientific knowledge in relation to understanding how scientific claims and practices circulate through and are incorporated into society. Only with the emergence of STS as a field of its own has this imbalance between production and reception gradually been righted.

Second, STS has to confront charges of redundancy. Science and technology studies claims special status as “the” field that observes and interprets the work of S&T, but this privileged position is by no means universally accepted. Indeed, the traditional social sciences and humanities at many universities are reluctant to concede any territory to an autonomous STS. Disciplinary scholars insist more or less openly that the map of existing disciplines is good enough to support any of the highways needed for traffic in STS. Thus, it is difficult to persuade a sociologist that STS is not synonymous with the sociology of science, or an anthropologist that anything more than ethnography is needed to study the cultures of science or technology. Accordingly, strict disciplinarians argue that there is little value to STS as sovereign academic currency. It unlocks no doors to new research questions or methods, let alone to successful professional careers. Would-be STS graduate students are often told that they would be better off with a degree in a recognized discipline, with a sideline in studying science or technology. These are, to some degree, self-serving assessments. Few of the disciplines named in the IESBS have recognized the study of science and technology as legitimate specialties within their own intellectual configurations. More usual is the reaction of a political scientist at a major research university who once told me, “My department would never hire someone in the politics of science.” Regrettably, blocking appointments and degree programs in STS effectively dries up the pipeline of human resources dedicated to comprehensive studies of S&T. University administrators for their part can rarely be counted on to create new conditions of possibility. Faced with interdisciplinary boundary struggles and resource constraints, they are more likely to draw back from the hard work of adjudicating among competing claims, to the disadvantage of any new island in the academic high seas.

Third, many scholars who see themselves as members of the STS community are hesitant to support disciplining in either sense of that term: importing order and coherence into the delightfully unruly territory they came to know as STS in the 1970s; or constituting STS as what some dismissively called a “high-church,” an elitist and exclusionary academic enclave that inhibits free thinking and creativity (see Fuller 1993 ). External funding initiatives, whether from governments or private donors and foundations, could overcome some of these hesitations, to the point of grounding new programs and reviving old ones (e.g., at Cornell, UCSD, and Wisconsin in the United States). Forging new transdisciplinary identities, however, demands an intensity of effort and engagement that seems unnecessary to academics whose own histories are discipline-based. Even the most secure STS programs in the United States and elsewhere have endured identity crises at some point in their development; at such times, moreover, new fields are substantially more likely than old ones to succumb to administrative pressures for efficiency and cost-cutting.

Fields demand organization for their survival and continuity, both to demarcate them from neighboring territories and to set up internal markers by which to measure such academically essential attributes as originality, quality, progress, and contributions to fundamental knowledge. Yet in a field’s emergent, formative phase, attempts to develop a curriculum, create a canon, evaluate students and faculty for professional advancement, or even represent the field in an encyclopedia or handbook all arouse high tension and anxiety. Who will be brought in and celebrated; who will be left out? Many therefore prefer the quieter option, which is to retain STS as a loosely constructed society to which anyone with a passing interest can gain easy entry. This broad-church approach satisfies liberal academics’ deep-seated desire for intellectual democracy, but it also gets in the way of critical stock-taking, meaningful theorizing, and methodological innovation—in short, of disciplining . In this respect, STS operates as its own most effective critic. It ratifies a status quo that militates against the field’s maturation as a self-defining, self-governing area of inquiry.

13.5 Conclusion

The problem of interdisciplinarity is often posed as one of harmonization, or bringing disparate perspectives into alignment so that different discourses can speak productively with one another. Much as independent nation-states have trouble subordinating their divergent interests and political cultures to agreements on common problems, so the traditional disciplines encounter frictions in their efforts to focus on socially salient phenomena—from climate change to the roiling of global financial markets—that seem to demand investigation from multiple perspectives. How should number crunchers speak to qualitative analysts, or critical theorists engage with advocates of game theory and rational choice? How should inductive, evidence-based, and practice-oriented scholarship find common ground with principled approaches that draw authority from historical texts and frameworks that have little bearing on the issues of the present? Is integration possible and desirable, as in behavioral science or area studies (see Klein , this volume), or are exchange and bridge-building the only realistic alternatives? And who decides when and by what criteria participants in an interdisciplinary venture have made sufficient contributions to the purposes of the academy to merit their own charter of independence?

Science and technology studies has encountered all of these problems, and to some extent coped with them, but in a context that makes the field’s challenges larger and more consequential than those of interdisciplinarity more generally. For what is at stake in the success of STS is the underlying self-understanding of the disciplines themselves as coherent and unified entities. By contesting such dominant understandings, as a field with epistemology as its primary focus must do, STS enters into troubled and uncertain territory. In the terms sketched here, the future of STS depends on redrawing the map of the disciplines to demonstrate that they are all islands of happenstance, with unmapped waters between; STS then can claim a space for itself as another fertile territory in these wide waters, offering resources for understanding some of humanity’s most impressive accomplishments, but without threatening anything achieved, or yet to be achieved, in other quarters of the disciplinary archipelago. What is needed to make this case, first and foremost, is an abiding conviction on the part of STS-islanders that they have shared crafts and practices, and valuable goods to offer, in the ongoing enterprises of pedagogy and scholarship. There are major obstacles to achieving such agreement, both internal and external to the field. Equally, however, there are growing numbers of ambassadors abroad who confidently wear the badge of STS as their primary academic credential. The future of the field will depend on their intellectual ambition, rhetorical skills, and diplomatic acumen.

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Sismondo, S. ( 2010 ). An introduction to science and technology studies. Second Edition. Chichester, West Sussex (UK): Wiley-Blackwell.

Smelser, N. J. , & Baltes, P. B. (Eds.-in-chief). ( 2001 ). International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences—IESBS (26 vols.). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Wynne, B. ( 1995 ). Public understanding of science. In S. Jasanoff et al. (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology studies , pp. 361–388. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

I had already coedited the second edition of the field’s own handbook ( Jasanoff et al. 1995 ), but inclusion in the IESBS meant more explicitly staking out a claim for STS in relation to other disciplines.

The story told in this chapter is unavoidably US- and Euro-centric, given the author’s experiences and knowledge limitations. However, STS is an increasingly international field, whose past, present, and future rest on global networks of scholarship and exchange. One way to strengthen the account offered here would be to trace parallel genealogies of the emergence of STS from other national and regional vantage points, particularly in emerging industrial societies. That is an impossible undertaking in a chapter of this scope. Yet, the coming together of those histories, and the resulting strands of theorizing and research, in the global academic marketplace will undoubtedly contribute to STS’s future strength and liveliness.

Note that the two alternatives captured by my cartographic metaphor correspond roughly to the categories of multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity presented in Klein’s taxonomy in this volume. The taxonomic approach, however, does not problematize the taken-for-grantedness of disciplinary boundaries, nor emphasize their contingency or question their claims to coherence as I implicitly do in this chapter.

SSK contrasted, in particular, with then dominant trends in US sociology of science, which concentrated more on the social organization and roles of scientists than on their specific knowledge-producing practices. American sociology of science was led by a number of distinguished practitioners, such as Robert K. Merton of Columbia, but their work increasingly diverged in aims and methods from the more epistemologically, metaphysically, and semiotically inclined European schools.

Institutional changes supporting this expansion of the STS agenda include the establishment of the Japanese Society for Science and Technology Studies in 2001, the launch of the international journal East Asian Science, Technology and Society in 2007, and the formation of the STS-Africa Network in 2011.

Warranting mention in this connection is the entire special issue of Science and Engineering Ethics , Vol. 17, No. 4 (2011), “Science and Technology in the Making: Observation and Engagement,” edited by Stephanie Bird and Erik Fisher.

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YSN Doctoral Programs: Steps in Conducting a Literature Review

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• Steps in Conducting a Literature Review

What is a literature review?

A literature review is an integrated analysis -- not just a summary-- of scholarly writings and other relevant evidence related directly to your research question.  That is, it represents a synthesis of the evidence that provides background information on your topic and shows a association between the evidence and your research question.

A literature review may be a stand alone work or the introduction to a larger research paper, depending on the assignment.  Rely heavily on the guidelines your instructor has given you.

Why is it important?

A literature review is important because it:

• Explains the background of research on a topic.
• Demonstrates why a topic is significant to a subject area.
• Discovers relationships between research studies/ideas.
• Identifies major themes, concepts, and researchers on a topic.
• Identifies critical gaps and points of disagreement.
• Discusses further research questions that logically come out of the previous studies.

APA7 Style resources

APA Style Blog - for those harder to find answers

1. Choose a topic. Define your research question.

Your literature review should be guided by your central research question.  The literature represents background and research developments related to a specific research question, interpreted and analyzed by you in a synthesized way.

• Make sure your research question is not too broad or too narrow.  Is it manageable?
• Begin writing down terms that are related to your question. These will be useful for searches later.
• If you have the opportunity, discuss your topic with your professor and your class mates.

2. Decide on the scope of your review

How many studies do you need to look at? How comprehensive should it be? How many years should it cover? 

• This may depend on your assignment.  How many sources does the assignment require?

3. Select the databases you will use to conduct your searches.

Make a list of the databases you will search. 

Where to find databases:

• use the tabs on this guide
• Find other databases in the Nursing Information Resources web page
• More on the Medical Library web page
• ... and more on the Yale University Library web page

4. Conduct your searches to find the evidence. Keep track of your searches.

• Use the key words in your question, as well as synonyms for those words, as terms in your search. Use the database tutorials for help.
• Save the searches in the databases. This saves time when you want to redo, or modify, the searches. It is also helpful to use as a guide is the searches are not finding any useful results.
• Review the abstracts of research studies carefully. This will save you time.
• Use the bibliographies and references of research studies you find to locate others.
• Check with your professor, or a subject expert in the field, if you are missing any key works in the field.
• Ask your librarian for help at any time.
• Use a citation manager, such as EndNote as the repository for your citations. See the EndNote tutorials for help.

Review the literature

Some questions to help you analyze the research:

• What was the research question of the study you are reviewing? What were the authors trying to discover?
• Was the research funded by a source that could influence the findings?
• What were the research methodologies? Analyze its literature review, the samples and variables used, the results, and the conclusions.
• Does the research seem to be complete? Could it have been conducted more soundly? What further questions does it raise?
• If there are conflicting studies, why do you think that is?
• How are the authors viewed in the field? Has this study been cited? If so, how has it been analyzed?

Tips: 

• Review the abstracts carefully.  
• Keep careful notes so that you may track your thought processes during the research process.
• Create a matrix of the studies for easy analysis, and synthesis, across all of the studies.
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The Many Faces of Participation in Science

Literature review and proposal for a three-dimensional framework.

• Philipp Schrögel Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
• Alma Kolleck Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

Participatory and dialogic formats are the current trend in scientific communities across all disciplines, with movements such as Public Participation, citizen science, Do-It-Yourself-Science, Public Science and many more. While these formats and the names and definitions given to them, are prospering and diversifying, there is no integrative tool to describe and compare different participatory approaches. In particular, several theories and models on participatory science governance and citizen science have been developed but these theories are poorly linked. A review of existing typologies and frameworks in the field reveals that there is no single descriptive framework that covers the normative, epistemological and structural differences within the field while being open enough to describe the great variety of participatory research. We propose a three-dimensional framework, the participatory science cube, which bridges this gap. We discuss the framework’s openness for different forms of participation as well as potential shortcomings and illustrate its application by analysing four case studies.

How to Cite

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Science & Technology Studies is the official journal of EASST

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5 year impact factor: 2.494

Acceptance rate: 15%

Days to first editorial decision (2023): 24

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Literature Review on the Impact of Digital Technology on Learning and Teaching

This literature review was commissioned by the Scottish Government to explore how the use of digital technology for learning and teaching can support teachers, parents, children and young people in improving outcomes and achieving our ambitions for education in Scotland

Digital learning and raising attainment

Key findings

There is conclusive evidence that digital equipment, tools and resources can, where effectively used, raise the speed and depth of learning in science and mathematics for primary and secondary age learners. There is indicative evidence that the same can be said for some aspects of literacy, especially writing and comprehension. Digital technologies appear to be appropriate means to improve basic literacy and numeracy skills, especially in primary settings.

The effect sizes are generally similar to other educational interventions that are effective in raising attainment, though the use of digital learning has other benefits. Also, the extent of the effect may be dampened by the level of capability of teachers to use digital learning tools and resources effectively to achieve learning outcomes. More effective use of digital teaching to raise attainment includes the ability of teachers to identify how digital tools and resources can be used to achieve learning outcomes and adapting their approach, as well as having knowledge and understanding of the technology. This applies in all schools.

Where learners use digital learning at home as well as school for formal and non-formal learning activities these have positive effects on their attainment, because they have extended their learning time. This is particularly important for secondary age learners.

The assessment framework, set out in Annex 2 , identifies a number of educational benefits that digital learning and teaching has the potential to help learners aged 5 to 18 to realise, through the opportunity to learn in different ways, access more sources of information, and be tested and get feedback differently. In terms of raising attainment, these benefits include short term outcomes, such as having a greater feeling of control over learning and more confidence to practise a skill, through to medium term outcomes such as faster acquisition of knowledge and skills, and improved impacts in terms of learners achieving higher exam or test results where digital technology has been used.

In this section, the impact of digital technology on children's attainment in a range of areas is discussed, followed by the impact on aspects of numeracy, literacy and science learning.

Raising children's attainment

There is a substantial body of research that has examined the impact of digital tools and resources on children's attainment in a range of areas.

Higgins et al (2012) provide a summary of research findings from studies with experimental and quasi-experimental designs, which have been combined in meta-analyses to assess the impact of digital learning in schools. Their search identified 48 studies which synthesised empirical research of the impact of digital tools and resources on the attainment of school age learners (5-18 year olds).

They found consistent but small positive associations between digital learning and educational outcomes. For example, Harrison et al (2004) identified statistically significant findings, positively associating higher levels of ICT use with school achievement at each Key Stage in England, and in English, maths, science, modern foreign languages and design technology. Somekh et al (2007) identified a link between high levels of ICT use and improved school performance. They found that the rate of improvement in tests in English at the end of primary education was faster in ICT Test Bed education authorities in England than in equivalent comparator areas. However, Higgins et al note that while these associations show, on average, schools with higher than average levels of ICT provision also have learners who perform slightly higher than average, it may be the case that high performing schools are more likely to be better equipped or more prepared to invest in technology or more motivated to bring about improvement.

Higgins et al report that in general analyses of the impact of digital technology on learning, the typical overall effect size is between 0.3 and 0.4 - just slightly below the overall average for researched interventions in education (Sipe & Curlette, 1997; Hattie, 2008) and no greater than other researched changes to teaching to raise attainment, such as peer tutoring or more focused feedback to learners. The range of effect sizes is also very wide (-0.03 to 1.05),which suggests that it is essential to take into account the differences between technologies and how they are used.

Table 4: Summary of meta-analyses published between 2000 and 2012 (in Higgins et al 2012)

In an earlier meta-analysis, Liao et al (2007), considered the effects of digital tools and resources on elementary school learners' achievement in Taiwan. Synthesizing research comparing the effects of digital learning (equipment, tools and resources) with traditional instruction on elementary school learners' achievement, they considered quantitative and qualitative information from 48 studies including over 5,000 learners. Of the 48 studies, 44 (92%) showed positive effects in favour of a computer assisted intervention, while four (8%) were negative and favoured a traditional instruction method. Nearly 60% of the studies examined the effects of computer aided instruction for teaching mathematics or science. Another 11% of the studies concentrated on the teaching of reading and language. They found an overall positive effect size across all the studies of 0.45 (study-weighted grand mean), which is considered to be a moderate effect, with a wide range of effect sizes (from 0.25 to 2.67).

No significant differences were found between subject areas, and the authors suggest that digital learning has the potential to be implemented in many different subject areas. They found that the two subjects that showed the highest effects were reading and languages, which had a high positive effect size of 0.7. Studies using computer simulations also had higher effects. The authors suggest this may be because simulations can provide learners with the opportunity to engage in a learning activity which could not be replicated in a classroom.

More qualitative studies have identified how improvements in attainment are achieved. From a wide study of primary and secondary schools in England that were early adopters in using digital learning and teaching, Jewitt et al (2011) concluded that:

• Using digital resources provided learners with more time for active learning in the classroom;
• Digital tools and resources provided more opportunity for active learning outside the classroom, as well as providing self-directed spaces, such as blogs and forums, and access to games with a learning benefit;
• Digital resources provided learners with opportunities to choose the learning resources;
• The resources provided safer spaces for formative assessment and feedback.

The sections below focus on specific key areas of attainment: literacy, numeracy, and science learning.

There is a large body of research that has examined the impact of digital equipment, tools and resources on children's literacy. The effects are generally positive, though not as large as the effects found where digital learning is used to improve numeracy, and consistent in finding that ICT helps improve reading and writing skills, as well as developing speaking and listening skills.

Effect of context

Archer and Savage (2014) undertook a meta-analysis to reassess the outcomes presented in three previous meta-analyses considering the impact of digital learning on language and literacy learning: Slavin et al (2008 and 2009) and Torgenson and Zhu (2003). Overall they found a relatively small average positive effect size of 0.18, with a few of the studies having a negative effect and three studies showing moderate to large effect sizes. The authors found that programmes with a small number of participants tended to show larger effect sizes than larger programmes but that not all were statistically significant.

Archer and Savage sought to understand whether the context within which the digital tool or resource was used has an impact on outcomes. In particular, they examined whether training and support given to the teachers or other staff delivering the programme had an impact. The authors found that training and support could be identified in around half of the studies and that it did appear to have a positive impact on the effectiveness of the literacy intervention, with the average effect size rising to 0.57. The authors conclude that this indicates the importance of including implementation factors, such as training and support, when considering the relative effectiveness of digital learning and teaching.

Effect on specific literacy skills

In their meta-analysis, Higgins et al (2012) found that digital learning has a greater impact on writing than on reading or spelling. For example, Torgenson and Zhu (2003) reviewed the impact of using digital technology on the literacy competences of 5-16 year-olds in English and found effect sizes on spelling (0.2) and reading (0.28) much lower than the high effect size for writing (0.89).

In their meta-analysis of studies investigating the effects of digital technology on primary schools in Taiwan, Laio et al (2007) considered studies over a range of curriculum areas; 11 of which addressed the effects of using digital learning in one or more literacy competence. They found no significant differences in effect size between the different subject areas, suggesting the potential for digital technology to raise outcomes is equal across different subjects. However, they did note that the two areas that showed the highest effect sizes (over 0.7) were reading and comprehension.

Effect of specific digital tools and resources

Somekh et al (2007) evaluated the Primary School Whiteboard Expansion ( PSWB ) project in England. They found that the length of time learners were taught with interactive whiteboards ( IWB s) was a major factor in learner attainment at the end of primary schooling, and that there were positive impacts on literacy (and numeracy) once teachers had experienced sustained use and the technology had become embedded in pedagogical practice. This equated to improvements at Key Stage 2 writing (age 11), where boys with low prior attainment made 2.5 months of additional progress.

Hess (2014) investigated the impact of using e-readers and e-books in the classroom, among 9-10 year olds in the USA . The e-books were used in daily teacher-led guided reading groups, replacing traditional print books in these sessions. Teachers also regularly used the e-readers in sessions where the class read aloud, and e-readers were available to learners during the school day for silent reading. The study found a significant difference in reading assessment scores for the group using the e-readers. Scores improved for both male and female learners and the gap between males and females decreased.

The use of digital tools and resources also appears to affect levels of literacy. Lysenko and Abrami (2014) investigated the use of two digital tools on reading comprehension for elementary school children (aged 6-8) in Quebec, Canada. The first was a multimedia tool which linked learning activities to interactive digital stories. The tool included games to engage learners in reading and writing activities, and instructions were provided orally to promote listening comprehension. The second tool was a web-based electronic portfolio in which learners could create a personalised portfolio of their reading and share work with peers, teachers and parents to get feedback. The authors found that in classes where both tools were used together during the whole school year learners performed significantly better both in vocabulary and reading comprehension (with medium-level effect sizes) than learners in classes where the tools were not part of English language instruction.

Rosen and Beck-Hill (2012) reported on a study programme that incorporated an interactive core curriculum and a digital teaching platform. At the time of their report it was available for 9-11 year old learners in English language, arts and mathematics classes in Dallas, Texas. The online platform contained teaching and learning tools. Learners were assessed using standardised tests administered before the programme and after a year's participation. The results of increased achievement scores demonstrated that in each of the two school year groups covered, the experimental learners significantly outperformed the control learners in reading and maths scores. In observations in classrooms that used the programme, the researchers observed higher teacher-learner interaction, a greater number and type of teaching methods per class, more frequent and complex examples of differentiation processes and skills, more frequent opportunities for learner collaboration, and significantly higher learner engagement. The authors report that the teaching pedagogy observed in the classrooms differed significantly from that observed in more traditional classrooms. The teachers following the programme commented that the digital resources made planning and implementing 'differentiation' more feasible. This is differentiation of teaching in terms of content, process, and product, to reflect learners' readiness, interests, and learning profile, through varied instructional and management strategies.

Effect of the amount and quality of digital technology use

The uses of digital technology and access to it appear to be critical factors. Lee et al (2009) analysed how in the US 15-16 year-old learners' school behaviour and standardised test scores in literacy are related to computer use. Learners were asked how many hours a day they typically used a computer for school work and for other activities. The results indicated that the learners who used the computer for one hour a day for both school work and other activities had significantly better reading test scores and more positive teacher evaluations for their classroom behaviours than any other groups [5] . This was found while controlling for socio-economic status, which has been shown to be a predictor of test scores in other research. The analysis used data from a national 2002 longitudinal study, and it is likely that learners' usage of computers has increased and changed since that time.

Biagi and Loi (2013), using data from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment ( PISA ) and information on how learners used digital technology at school and at home (both for school work and for entertainment), assessed the relationship between the intensity with which learners used digital tools and resources and literacy scores. They examined uses for: gaming activities (playing individual or collective online games), collaboration and communication activities (such as linking with others in on-line chat or discussion forums), information management and technical operations (such as searching for and downloading information) and creating content, knowledge and problem solving activities (such as using computers to do homework or running simulations at school). These were then compared to country specific test scores in reading. The authors found a positive and significant relationship between gaming activity and language attainment in 11 of the 23 countries studied. For the other measures, where relationships existed and were significant, they tended to be negative.

The more recent PISA data study ( OECD , 2015, using 2012 results) also found a positive relationship between the use of computers and better results in literacy where it is evident that digital technology is being used by learners to increase study time and practice [6] . In addition, it found that the effective use of digital tools is related to proficiency in reading.

There is a large body of research which has examined the impact of digital equipment, tools and resources on children's numeracy skills and mathematical competences throughout schooling. Higgins et al (2012) found from their meta-analysis that effect sizes of tested gains in knowledge and understanding tend to be greater in mathematics and science than in literacy. The key benefits found relate to problem solving skills, practising number skills and exploring patterns and relationships (Condie and Monroe, 2007), in addition to increased learner motivation and interest in mathematics.

Effect on specific numeracy skills

Li and Ma's (2010) meta-analysis of the impact of digital learning on school learners' mathematics learning found a generally positive effect. The authors considered 46 primary studies involving a total of over 36,000 learners in primary and secondary schools. About half of the mathematics achievement outcomes were measured by locally-developed or teacher-made instruments, and the other half by standardized tests. Almost all studies were well controlled, employing random assignment of learners to experimental or control conditions.

Overall, the authors found that, on average, there was a high, significantly positive effect of digital technology on mathematics achievement (mean effect size of 0.71), indicating that, in general, learners learning mathematics with the use of digital technology had higher mathematics achievement than those learning without digital technology. The authors found that:

• Although the difference was small, younger school learners (under 13 years old) had higher attainment gains than older secondary school learners;
• Gains were more positive where teaching was more learner-centred than teacher-centred. In this regard, the authors differentiate between traditional models, where the teacher tends to teach to the whole class, and a learner-centred teaching model which is discovery-based (inquiry-oriented) or problem-based (application-oriented) learning;
• Shorter interventions (six months or less) were found to be more effective in promoting mathematics achievement than longer interventions (between six and 12 months). It is suggested that such gains in mathematics achievement are a result of the novelty effects of technology, as suggested in other research, and as learners get familiar with the technology the novelty effects tend to decrease;
• The authors found no significant effects from different types of computer technology on mathematics achievement. Whether it was used as communication media, a tutorial device, or exploratory environment, learners displayed similar results in their mathematics achievement;
• Equally, the authors found no significant relationship between the effect of using digital technology and the characteristics of learners included in the samples for studies, such as gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic characteristics.

The studies by Lee et al (2009) and Biagi and Loi (2013) found similar results for mathematics as they did for reading and literacy in relation to the use of digital equipment. Learners who used a computer at least one hour a day for both school work and other activities had significantly better mathematics test scores and more positive teacher evaluations for their classroom behaviour in mathematics classes than those who did not use the computer. Biagi and Loi (2013) found a significant positive relationship between intensity of gaming activity and maths test scores in 15 countries out of the 23 studied. As with language, the authors found that learners' total use of digital technologies was positively and significantly associated with PISA test scores for maths in 18 of the 23 countries studied.

Studies have found that using digital equipment for formal learning is also associated with increases in learners' motivation for learning mathematics. House and Telese (2011 and 2012) found that:

• For learners aged 13 and 14 in South Korea, for example, those who expressed high levels of enjoyment at learning mathematics, more frequently used computers in their mathematics homework. However, learners who more frequently played computer games and used the internet outside of school tended to report that they did not enjoy learning mathematics;
• Learners in the USA and Japan aged 13 and 14 who showed higher levels of algebra achievement also used computers more at home and at school for school work. Those who used computers most for other activities had lower test scores. In each of the USA and Japan they found that overall computer usage which included use for school work was significantly related to improvements in test scores.

Somekh et al (2007) found that, once the use of IWB s was embedded, in Key Stage 1 mathematics (age 7) in England, high attaining girls made gains of 4.75 months, enabling them to catch up with high attaining boys. In Key Stage 2 mathematics (age 11), average and high attaining boys and girls who had been taught extensively with the IWB made the equivalent of an extra 2.5 to 5 months' progress over the course of two years.

Digital tools and resources can also increase some learners' confidence in mathematics as well as their engagement in new approaches to learning and their mathematical competences. Overcoming learners' anxieties about mathematics and their competence in specific aspects of the subject are common concerns in teaching mathematics which hampers their ability to learn (reported in Huang et al 2014).

Huang et al (2014) researched the outcomes, in Taiwan, from a computer game simulating the purchase of commodities, from which 7 and 8 year-old primary school learners can learn addition and subtraction, and apply mathematical concepts. The model combined games-based learning with a diagnosis system. When the learner made a mistake, the system could detect the type of mistake and present corresponding instructions to help the learner improve their mathematical comprehension and application. The authors compared two learning groups: both used the game-based model but one without the diagnostic, feedback element. They found that the learning achievement post-test showed a significant difference and also that the mathematics anxiety level of the two learner groups was decreased by about 3.5%.

Passey (2011) found that among over 300 schools in England using Espresso digital resources, those that had been using them over a longer period made significantly greater increases in end of primary school numeracy test results than schools which were recent users.

Science learning

Effects on science knowledge and skills

In their meta-analysis, Laio et al (2007) considered 11 studies looking at the impact of digital technology on science learning. These had a moderate average effect size of 0.38 and generally had positive effects. Condie and Monroe (2007) identified that digital learning made science more interesting, authentic and relevant for learners and provided more time for post-experiment analysis and discussion.

In their study of the PISA data, Biagi and Loi (2013) found a significant positive relationship between learners' total use of digital equipment and science test scores in 21 of the 23 countries they studied. They also found evidence of a significant positive relationship between the intensity of using gaming activity and science scores in 13 of the 23 countries they studied. Somekh et al (2007) found that in primary school science all learners, except high attaining girls, made greater progress when given more exposure to IWB s, with low attaining boys making as much as 7.5 months' additional progress.

Effects of specific digital tools and resources

Digital tools and resources generally have a positive effect on learners' science learning. This can be seen from a number of studies assessing outcomes for learners in different stages of education.

Hung et al (2012) explored the effect of using multi-media tools in science learning in an elementary school's science course in Taiwan. Learners were asked to complete a digital storytelling project by taking pictures with digital cameras, developing the story based on the pictures taken, producing a film based on the pictures by adding subtitles and a background, and presenting the story. From the experimental results, the authors found that this approach improved the learners' motivation to learn science, their attitude, problem-solving capability and learning achievements. In addition, interviews found that the learners in the experimental group enjoyed the project-based learning activity and thought it helpful because of the digital storytelling aspect.

Hsu et al (2012) investigated the effects of incorporating self-explanation principles into a digital tool facilitating learners' conceptual learning about light and shadow with 8-9 year old learners in Taiwan. While they found no difference in the overall test scores of the experimental and control groups, they found a statistically significant difference in retention test scores. Those learners who had paid more attention to the self-explanation prompts tended to outperform those in the control group.

Anderson and Barnett's (2013) study, in the US , examined how a digital game used by learners aged 12-13 increased their understanding of electromagnetic concepts, compared to learners who conducted a more traditional inquiry-based investigation of the same concepts. There was a significant difference between the control and experimental groups in gains in knowledge and understanding of physics concepts. Additionally, learners in the experimental group were able to give more nuanced responses about the descriptions of electric fields and the influence of distance on the forces that change experience because of what they learnt during the game.

Güven and Sülün (2012) considered the effects of computer-enhanced teaching in science and technology courses on the structure and properties of matter, such as the periodical table, chemical bonding, and chemical reactions, for 13-14 year olds in Turkey. Their proposition was that computer-enhanced teaching can instil a greater sense of interest in scientific and technological developments, make abstract concepts concrete through simulation and modelling, and help to carry out some dangerous experiments in the classroom setting. They found a significant difference in achievement tests between the mean scores of the group of learners who were taught with the computer-enhanced teaching method and the control group who were taught with traditional teaching methods.

Belland (2009) investigated the extent to which a digital tool improved US middle school children's ability to form scientific arguments. Taking the premise that being able to construct and test an evidence-based argument is critical to learning science, he studied the impact of using a digital problem based learning tool on 12-14 year olds. Learners worked in small groups and were asked to develop and present proposals for spending a grant to investigate an issue relating to the human genome project. Those in the experimental group used an online system which structured the project into stages of scientific enquiry. The system prompted the learners to structure and organise their thinking in particular ways: by prompting the learners individually, sharing group members' ideas, tasking the group to form a consensus view, and prompting the group to assign specific tasks among themselves.

Using pre- and post- test scores to assess the impact on learners' abilities to evaluate arguments, Belland found a high positive effect size of 0.62 for average-achieving learners compared to their peers in the control group. No significant impacts were found for higher or lower-achieving learners. Belland suggests that for high-achieving learners, this may be because they already have good argument making skills and are already able to successfully structure how they approach an issue and gather evidence. The study also used qualitative information to consider how the learners used the digital tool and compared this to how learners in the control group worked. The author found that in the experimental group they made more progress and were more able to divide tasks up between them, which saved time. They also used the tool more and the teacher less to provide support.

Kucukozer et al (2009) examined the impact of digital tools on teaching basic concepts of astronomy to 11-13 year old school children in Turkey. Learners were asked to make predictions about an astronomical phenomenon such as what causes the seasons or the phases of the moon. A digital tool was used to model the predictions and display their results. The learners were then asked to explain the differences and the similarities between their predictions and their observations. In the prediction and explanation phase the learners worked in groups to discuss their ideas and come to a conclusion. In the observation phase they watched the 3D models presented by their teacher. Thereafter, they were asked to discuss and make conclusions about what they had watched. The authors found that instruction supported by observations and the computer modelling was significantly effective in bringing about better conceptual understanding and learning on the subject.

Ingredients of success

Where studies examine the process that brings about positive results from digital learning and teaching compared to traditional approaches, it is evident that these are more likely to be achieved where digital equipment, tools and resources are used for specific learning outcomes and built into a teaching model from the outset. This broadly supports Higgins et al's (2012) conclusions that:

• Digital technology is best used as a supplement to normal teaching rather than as a replacement for it;
• It is not whether technology is used (or not) which makes the difference, but how well the technology is applied to support teaching and learning by teachers;
• More effective schools and teachers are more likely to use digital technologies effectively than other schools.

Differences in effect sizes and the extent that learners achieve positive gains in attainment are ascribed by most authors of the studies above to:

• The quality of teaching and the ability of teachers to use the digital equipment and tools effectively for lessons;
• The preparation and training teachers are given to use equipment and tools;
• The opportunities teachers have to see how digital resources can be used and pedagogies adapted (Rosen and Beck-Hill, 2012; Belland, 2009).

Teachers have to adapt to learner-centred approaches to learning if they are to use digital tools and resources (Li and Ma, 2010).

As well as ensuring digital tools and resources are supporting learning goals, success appears to also be linked to some other factors:

• The availability of equipment and tools within schools (and at home);
• How learners use digital equipment. Higgins et al (2012) found that collaborative use of technology (in pairs or small groups) is usually more effective than individual use, though some learners - especially younger children - may need guidance in how to collaborate effectively and responsibly;
• The extent that teaching continues to innovate using digital tools and resources (Higgins et al, 2012).

Fullan (2013) suggested four criteria that schools should meet if their use of digital technology to support increased attainment is to be successful. These were that systems should be engaging for learners and teachers; easy to adapt and use; ubiquitous - with access to the technology 24/7; and steeped in real life problem solving.

Fullan and Donnelly (2013) developed these themes further, proposing an evaluation tool to enable educators to systematically evaluate new companies, products and school models, using the context of what they have seen as necessary for success. Questions focus on the three key criteria of pedagogy (clarity and quality of intended outcome, quality of pedagogy and the relationship between teacher and learner, and quality of assessment platform and functioning); system change (implementation support, value for money, and whole system change potential) and technology (quality of user experience/model design, ease of adaptation, and comprehensiveness and integration).

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• Published: 25 March 2022

Seawater desalination concentrate—a new frontier for sustainable mining of valuable minerals

• Basel Abu Sharkh 1 ,
• Ahmad A. Al-Amoudi 1 ,
• Mohammed Farooque   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4529-7130 1 ,
• Christopher M. Fellows   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8976-8651 1 , 2 ,
• Seungwon Ihm 1 ,
• Sangho Lee 1 , 3 ,
• Sheng Li 1 &
• Nikolay Voutchkov 1 , 4  

npj Clean Water volume  5 , Article number:  9 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Marine chemistry

The ocean has often been announced as a sustainable source of important materials for civilization. Application of the same extraction processes to desalination concentrate, rather than to unconcentrated seawater, will necessarily be more energetically favorable, so the expansion of seawater desalination in recent decades brings this dream closer to reality. However, there is relatively little concrete commercial development of ‘concentrate mining’. This review assesses the technical and economic prospects for utilization of commercially viable products from seawater. The most important technologies for economic use of products from desalination plant concentrate are technologies for more economic separation and technologies for more economic concentration. The most promising separation technologies are those, such as nanofiltration, which separate brine into streams enriched/depleted in entire classes of constituents with minimal input of energy and reagents. Concentration is becoming more economic due to rapid advances in Osmotically-Assisted RO technology. Despite very active research on many aspects of desalination concentrate utilization, it is likely that commercial development of the non-NaCl components of desalination brine will depend on the available market for NaCl, as the challenges and costs of extracting the other mineral components from bitterns in which they are highly enriched are so much less than those faced in direct treatment of brines.

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Introduction.

The world economy is heavily reliant on the sustainable supply of rare metals and valuable minerals and the development and deployment of sustainable products to the advanced manufacturing industries of the 21st century will require increased amounts of these materials. Advances in resource recovery technology over the last ten years have made extraction of minerals and metals from seawater desalination brine more cost-competitive in comparison to terrestrial mining 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . However, the distribution of chemical compounds present in seawater (Table 1 , Fig. 1 ) is dominated by a few abundant species of relatively low economic value. There have been periodic bursts of research enthusiasm into the isolation of low-abundance species from seawater since the 19th century—gold 5 , then uranium 6 , and more recently lithium 7 —but only the high-abundance species have ever given a commercial return. The goal of this review is to assess qualitatively which products from seawater desalination are commercially realistic in the medium term and which processes and technologies are most critical for enabling commercial production.

Concentration of chemical species in seawater and their commercial value, as estimated in September 2021. Rare earth data for North Atlantic surface water, Crocket 187 . Copper, Alexander & Corcoran 188 ; Germanium, mbari.org/chemsensor/ge/germanium.html; Gold, Falkner & Edmond 189 and references therein; Titanium, Croot 190 .

The metallic elements found in the highest concentration are sodium, magnesium, calcium and potassium, which have been commercially extracted as the chlorides, sulfates, and carbonates 1 while magnesium has been extracted as the hydroxide 8 .

Recent overviews of brine mining possibilities have shown graphs similar to Fig. 1 , with a line separating ‘economically feasible’ from ‘economically challenging’ target elements 9 , 10 , 11 . Such figures have sometimes used prices for pure metals which are not significant commercial products; in Fig. 1 , the concentrations and prices of the most commercially relevant salts have been used wherever possible. Concentrations in Fig. 1 are based primarily on the Standard Sea Water (SSW) composition available online at Stanford University ( https://web.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/mineral.html ) with price estimates for materials not traded on a publicly available exchange estimated from current price ranges on Indiamart and Alibaba.

The line of ‘economic feasibility’ cannot be a straight line over the entire range of the figure, as production of sodium chloride for a miniscule fraction of a cent would clearly be uneconomic; however, over a range of concentrations corresponding to typical ores a straight line is feasible. While processing costs for terrestrial mining typically scale with tonnage (W) according to W 0.5–0.7 12 , below a certain minimum threshold energy costs per kg of product have been found to scale with concentration to the power of -3 13 . While these are not the only costs involved in mining elements such as Li, Sr, and Rb, these dependencies suggest that a separation line with a slope >1, as in Loganathan et al. 10 , is more realistic than the shallower separation lines given in Shahmansouri et al. 9 or Kumar et al. 11 . The lowest grade of ore at which gold mines can operate profitably is about 0.5 ppm 14 , corresponding to about 0.025 ppm on seawater solids.

As can be seen from the two lines presented by Shahmansouri et al., the economics of brine mining will depend significantly on the amount of material processed. A plant producing in excess of 1 million m 3 brine per day will be able to implement processes which would be uneconomic for a plant producing 10,000 m 3 brine per day. While these lines differ greatly, they clearly delineate two sets of species with only a few doubtful intermediate cases, and only species lying to the right of all lines will be considered further. Note that bromine and sodium chloride, which have demonstrated profitability as products from seawater with current technologies, are present at concentrations more than an order of magnitude greater than all lines.

The potential income obtainable from a given volume of seawater from different sources is not immediately clear from Fig. 1 and has not been quantified explicitly in recent reviews of seawater mining. The relative economic importance of various chemical species extractable from seawater can be roughly estimated by multiplying the potential price range of a product by the total amount of limiting species present (Table 2 ). Only those compounds with a potential value of more than 1 USD per 1000 m 3 seawater are shown. Note that in almost every case, additional chemical and energy inputs will be required to get to a final saleable product.

Brine (concentrate) from desalination plants contains large quantities of minerals, enriched in concentration compared to sea water—thus the figures appearing in Table 2 could be multiplied by a factor between 1.5 and 2.5. In mining seawater directly, energy equivalent to the energy expended in seawater desalination plant operation would need to be explicitly added to the system to achieve such an increase in concentration. Extraction of mineral products from desalination plant concentrate has potential advantages compared to terrestrial mining of the same compounds. These include: the essentially inexhaustible scale of the ocean; the constant composition of the ocean; the vast capacity of the ocean to dilute treated waste streams; and the stable and fixed footprint of the mining operation.

Much of the discovered shallow high-grade mineral ore worldwide has been mined over many decades leaving poorer quality, more difficult to access, and less mineral-enriched ores for future extraction. Mining operations have become progressively more costly over the past few decades because of the increasing depth and scarcity of the mined ores, high costs for environmental impact mitigation, and lower quality ores remaining available for extraction 15 . Conventional mining can create a multitude of environmental problems including the generated wastes and their associated health risks. Even more stringent environmental regulations associated with terrestrial mining are likely to be applied in the future, which would further make terrestrial mining more challenging and costly.

As technologies for seawater brine mining develop, desalination concentrate as a source of minerals becomes more economically and environmentally viable. The economic gain obtained by extracting minerals is proportional to the increase in the concentration of minerals in the concentrate as well as the market price of these minerals. In this respect, mining of compounds of elements including Mg, Na, Ca, K, Sr, Li, Br, B, and Rb could potentially be economically attractive for harvesting from concentrate, if suitable methods of brine concentration and extraction are developed 10 . Economically, the cost of extraction needs to be weighed against the revenue achievable, which relies on market fluctuations of commodity prices. Environmentally, extraction from brine is less intrusive than conventional mining with the added benefit of reduction in brine volumes. Commercial viability has been assessed to be likely for a number of products, including bromine, chlorine, sodium hydroxide, magnesium, potassium salts, and uranium, many of which are currently or were historically produced economically from seawater 11 .

Process intensification is likely to result in further improvement in technologies, specifically membrane technologies, to sustainably recover minerals from concentrate 9 , 16 . Publications in the brine mining area have tended to take a high-level view with a goal of generating excitement in the area, or are narrowly targeted to address specific issues. The goal of this review is to address the most promising current and emerging technologies for brine mining and assess as realistically as possible the prospect for commercial application of these technologies to target minerals.

Mineral recovery economics

Historically, several minerals have been extracted commercially from seawater; some directly, and a larger number indirectly from bitterns after production of commercial NaCl. Due to the fascination of the ocean as a source of minerals, significant research effort has been put into isolation of a much broader range of chemical species than those that have been commercially exploited.

We have considered only those chemical substances appearing on the right-hand side of Fig. 1 , where the combination of price and availability makes economic viability more likely, in the approximate order of viability according to our assessment. For each substance or class of substances common applications are briefly mentioned and the current sources described. Existing or emergent technologies available for production from seawater desalination concentrate are discussed and specific potential benefits of production from desalination concentrate rather than current sources, if any, are highlighted.

Sodium chloride

Virtually every person in the world has some contact with sodium chloride (NaCl, table salt) on a daily basis. Sodium chloride is found in many processed foods, where it is added as an osmotic preservative, fermentation-control additive, texture-control agent and color developer, and consumers routinely add NaCl to their food as a flavor enhancer. However, the diverse industrial uses of salt account most of the world’s consumption. NaCl is not only used directly in many industrial processes, but is a major source of sodium and chlorine compounds used as feed stocks for further chemical syntheses. The single largest use of NaCl is in the chlor-alkali process as feedstock for chlorine and caustic soda manufacture and these two inorganic chemicals are used to make many consumer-related end-use products 17 . Similarly, in the soda ash industry, NaCl is used in the Solvay process to produce sodium carbonate and calcium chloride 18 . Sodium carbonate, in turn, is used to produce glass, sodium bicarbonate, and dyes, as well as a myriad of other chemicals. In the Mannheim process 19 and in the Hargreaves process 20 , NaCl is used for the production of sodium sulfate and hydrochloric acid. It is also used to make sodium chlorate, which is added along with sulfuric acid and water to manufacture chlorine dioxide for disinfection. Further applications of NaCl are in oil and gas exploration, textiles and dyeing, pulp and paper, metal processing, rubber manufacture and tanning and leather treatment. NaCl is also used extensively in water treatment, for softening of hard water, which contains excessive calcium and magnesium ions that contribute to the build-up of a scale or film of alkaline mineral deposits in household and industrial equipment and pipes 21 . Finally, large quantities of NaCl are used for de-icing and anti-icing of roads in sub-freezing weather 22 .

NaCl is currently produced by mining of rock salt, evaporation of seawater, or evaporation of brine from brine wells and salt lakes. In 2020, world production was estimated at 270 million tons, the top five producers (in million tons) being China (60.0), United States (39.0), India (28.0), Germany (14.0), and Australia (12.0) 23 . Although NaCl is a relatively low-value commodity, the locations of production are often not near consumers and hence transportation costs significantly add to the price. The shipping cost for oceanic, rail, or truck transportation can be an important determining factor when attempting to secure supply sources. In some cases, pumping NaCl brine through pipelines can be the most economical solution when distances are relatively short. Large bulk shipments of dry NaCl in ocean freighters or river barges are relatively low in cost but are restricted by points of origin and consumption. The type of NaCl (e.g., vacuum, rock, solar), its purity, production, processing, and packaging factors can influence the selling prices. The relevance of both NaCl transport costs and pricing variability to brine mining lies in the fact that NaCl is the bulk of the available product both in terms of amount and net value in seawater (Table 2 ). Where a market can be established for NaCl, the availability of bitterns in which the other components of seawater are further concentrated by more than an order of magnitude dramatically increases the commercial viability of extracting these other components.

Desalination increases the concentration of salt in desalination brine by as much as 100%. Most modern sea water desalination plants use reverse osmosis membranes with a recovery of 30–50%, depending on initial concentration of the sea water and other process factors. As a result, desalination brines can contain as much as 8% NaCl. This significant increase in concentration makes recovery of NaCl from desalination concentrate inherently more economical than conventional production of NaCl from seawater.

Bromine was extracted from seawater on an industrial scale throughout the 20th century as a critical ingredient in additives for leaded gasoline 24 . The process involved oxidation of the bromine present in seawater to bromine, followed by blowing air through the seawater to extract the volatile bromine. The bromine vapor was absorbed using alkali solution or sulfur dioxide to generate a concentrated liquor, which was then distilled to generate bromine product 25 , 26 . Ion-exchange 27 and membrane-based 28 methods for bromine extraction from brines have been extensively researched, but have not been applied to commercial production 29 . With the phasing out of leaded gasoline, the bromine market contracted significantly and plants extracting bromine from seawater ceased operations. More recently the bromine market has been expanding rapidly with continuing demand for bromine-containing flame retardants and emerging applications in clear brine fluids for oilfield completion, additives to reduce mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants, and salts for storage batteries for renewable energy. Bromine today is extracted using the same technologies once used from seawater, but from brines that have a higher bromide concentration: the main sources are the Dead Sea, underground brines in Arkansas and Shandong, and the bittern obtained from sea salt manufacture (chiefly in India, China and Japan) 30 . About 430,000 tons of bromine are produced worldwide per year. The volume of bittern produced by salt manufacture will clearly be limited by the available markets for sodium chloride, and many of the sources currently exploited are rapidly being depleted (e.g., the Dead Sea and the Bohai Gulf underground brine formations) 31 . The growing market for bromine products, the limited availability of natural brines with high bromide concentrations, and the increasing volumes and concentrations available from the output of desalination plants make desalination brine a plausible source to meet the growing demand for bromine.

In desalination brine, bromide obviously exists at a higher concentration than in seawater, which was economically used as a source for bromine until recently. This reduces the volume of material which needs to be handled with concomitant decreases in capital and operating expenditure. Most seawater desalination plants are also located in regions with year-round warm water, giving more efficient removal of bromine by air blowing than historical plants producing bromine from seawater (the Octel Amlwch plant, on the Irish Sea, could not operate at full capacity in the winter months (N. Summers, personal communication)).

Further improvement in the quality of brine as a feedstock for bromine extraction can be achieved by brine concentration, with brines obtained at the Desalination Technologies Research Institute (DTRI) in Saudi Arabia with bromide concentrations up to eight times that of standard seawater. The nanofiltration pre-treatment needed to obtain these concentrations also ensures that the scale-forming ions (primarily Ca 2+ and SO 4 2‒ ) that are a source of operational problems in other brine sources of bromine are removed: scale formation is a limitation to the current efficiency of bromine extraction, particularly from underground brines 32 . Whether brine concentration is cost-effective to maximize bromine production in the absence of a market for other brine components will clearly depend on the details of the market. Where a sufficient market for sodium chloride exists, bromine production can readily be implemented within an integrated process for adding value to desalination brine. This is most cost-effectively done by treating the bittern or crystallizer purge remaining after removal of the commercially available sodium chloride component of the brine.

Magnesium and magnesium salts

Magnesium compounds obtainable in seawater have a variety of useful applications in the agricultural, nutritional, chemical, construction and industrial industries. Magnesium itself is a low-density and therefore lightweight metal that produces strong alloys, which in recent years have replaced aluminum in many products in the construction, automotive, and consumer goods sectors. About 1 million metric tons of magnesium were produced worldwide in 2021 33 . Epsomite (MgSO 4 ·7H 2 O) has economic value principally as a fertilizer, while bischofite (MgCl 2 ·6H 2 O) is used in dust and ice control and brucite (Mg(OH) 2 ) is used as a fire retardant and in wastewater treatment. Approximately 3 million tons of epsomite, 3 million tons of bischofite, and 1 million tons of brucite were produced worldwide in 2021 34 .

Historically, magnesium and magnesium salts have been extracted on an industrial scale from seawater and are still extracted commercially from brines. The historical process for producing magnesium from seawater involved precipitation of magnesium as magnesium hydroxide through the addition of lime or dolime 35 . The magnesium hydroxide could then be treated in one of two ways: reacted with hydrochloric acid to generate magnesium chloride solution (Dow Process), or heated at high temperature to generate magnesium oxide which could then be reacted with hydrochloric acid or chlorine to generate anhydrous magnesium chloride (Norsk Hydro Process) 36 . In either case, the magnesium chloride was then used as a feedstock for the electrolytic generation of magnesium metal. Despite the greater energy consumption in obtaining a feedstock for electrolysis in the Norsk-Hydro process, the relative simplicity of the electrolysis step in comparison to the Dow process meant that both processes were economic until the 1990s. Production of magnesium salts from desalination brines has been seen as attractive since desalination brines first became available in significant volumes, but has not yet been commercialized 37 , 38 . Over the past quarter-century the production of magnesium and magnesium salts from brines has shrunk in importance with the advent of inexpensive magnesium produced from mined magnesite and dolomite, chiefly from China. Where magnesium metal is still extracted from brines, it is obtained from saline waters with a much higher magnesium content than seawater where large volumes of bischofite or carnallite can be precipitated directly without addition of chemicals (e.g., the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea). Magnesium hydroxide is still produced commercially from seawater in China, Japan, Ireland, the United States, and elsewhere, accounting for about 60% of world magnesium hydroxide production.

Key to the profitability of any process based on extraction of magnesium from desalination brine is avoiding as much as possible the chemical costs incurred in producing magnesium chloride and the energy costs in drying magnesium chloride for electrolysis 39 . Within the context of an integrated facility where sodium chloride is also produced, the magnesium-rich bitterns derived from desalination brines could be commercially viable sources for magnesium manufacture 40 . A transformative technology which could greatly improve the viability of this process is nanofiltration: Separation of desalination brines into divalent-rich and monovalent-rich streams by nanofiltration can generate an inexhaustible source of saline water approximating the composition of magnesium-rich lakes, and hence open the way to restoring the ocean as the main source of magnesium salts and magnesium metal. Sequential crystallization of the nanofiltration reject stream can in principle produce gypsum, epsomite, and bischofite requiring relatively little purification before use, although this process is yet to be implemented commercially.

Potassium salts

Potassium salts are in demand worldwide as fertilizer: potassium sulfate (sulfate of potash, SOP) and potassium ammonium sulfate are more attractive for this application than potassium chloride (muriate of potash, MOP) and command higher prices 41 . The total production of potash fertilizers worldwide is over 30 million tons per year. While these are critical materials and shortages have been forecast due to exhaustion of readily accessible evaporite deposits, the relatively low price of these salts means that they have not attracted as much attention as potential products from desalination brines 42 . Processes for sequential evaporation of bitterns to produce KCl have been patented 43 . As with other ions of interest, a variety of electrochemical, membrane-based, and adsorption-based methods have been investigated to the removal of potassium from seawater. Battery deionization using a Fe[Fe(CN) 6 ] electrode has been demonstrated to give 70% removal of K + with a 140:1 K:Na selectivity from synthetic seawater, but this is likely to be a very capital and energy-intensive method of producing KCl 44 . A polyamide membrane incorporating zeolite was found to give 4:1 K:Na selectivity and was proposed for continuous extraction of potassium from seawater 45 , and diatomite has shown selective adsorption of potassium and been suggested as a pathway to produce fertilizer 46 , but these processes are also unlikely to be economically viable.

Potassium sulfate can be produced from sea salt bitterns by treatment of a kainite (KCl·MgSO 4 ) mineral precipitate formed after removal of NaCl with sulfuric acid 47 and versions of this process have been applied commercially to underground brines. More capital-intensive methods of producing SOP from seawater investigated on the laboratory scale include removal of sulfate from an anion exchange membrane with KCl solution 48 and absorption of K + on clinoptilite followed by elution with ammonium sulfate 49 .

A process where potassium ammonium sulfate is generated from seawater by reaction of magnesium sulfate (produced by precipitation from chilled bitterns), aqueous ammonia, and potassium tartrate has been proposed; its viability would depend on the efficiency with which tartaric acid could be recycled in the process 50 .

Calcium salts

The calcium salts that could potentially be obtained from brine have market prices of the same order of magnitude as to the magnesium salts obtainable, but the amounts available are significantly less. The potential products are all readily available commercially from mining plentiful reserves (CaCO 3 , limestone, and CaSO 4 ·2H 2 O, gypsum) 51 , 52 or as a by-product from the Solvay process for production of sodium carbonate (CaCl 2 ) 18 , and are used in bulk in construction, agriculture, and chemical processes. More than 200 million tons of gypsum is used worldwide annually, overwhelmingly in low value construction applications. Calcium carbonate is used primarily in the production of cement and in roadbuilding aggregate and as a filler in plastics, with more than 100 million tons consumed annually. There appears to have been minimal academic or commercial interest in utilizing desalination brine as a source of these salts. As of 2017 a brackish water treatment facility in Southern California was producing calcium carbonate pellets economically from treatment of water with TDS of ~1000 ppm, but Ca clearly comprised a much larger proportion of the solids in the source water than is found in seawater 53 .

Lithium salts

Lithium extraction has attracted a great deal of research attention in recent years, due to the rapidly increasing market for Li-containing batteries for consumer electronics and electric cars. Production of lithium salts (in terms of amount of elemental lithium) has increased from 30,000 to ~100,000 metric tons since 2010 54 . The fact that the ocean contains an essentially inexhaustible store of lithium has exerted a hypnotic effect on scientists and funding agencies, despite the widespread availability of non-oceanic sources. While lithium is commercially extracted largely from brines, these are underground brines formed under unusual geological conditions which have concentrations thousands of times greater than that found in seawater—hundreds or thousands of ppm rather than high ppb 55 . This difference in concentration means that existing brine treatment technologies, which rely on precipitating Li salts, cannot be directly applied to seawater or desalination brines 56 . Attempts to achieve selective absorption 57 , selective permeation 58 , and/or exploit the electrochemical behavior 59 of lithium have been the main strategies investigated for extraction of Li from dilute solutions.

Manganese dioxide-based ion-sieve materials have been the most extensively investigated strategy for separation of lithium from complex aqueous solutions 60 . The small size of the Li + ion means it can penetrate the spinel structure of MnO 2 and thus exhibit a higher selective adsorption on MnO 2 61 . Various strategies have been employed to improve the selectivity and efficiency of this innate property of manganese dioxide, including combining it with graphene oxide 62 , cellulose 63 , or cellulose acetate 64 membranes, intercalating titanium into the MnO 2 lattice 65 , and using electrolytic approaches based on MnO 2 electrodes 66 .

Other materials that have been shown promise for selective lithium absorption are polydopamine 67 , polymeric 1,3-diketones 68 , and ruthenium complexes embedded in a poly(methacrylic acid) resin 69 . Methods based on selective complexation of lithium followed by liquid-liquid extraction 70 , 71 , transport through a liquid membrane 72 , or transport through a solid membrane 73 have also attracted significant research interest.

Recently a few studies have reported very large Li + :Na + selectivities in seawater treatment. An electrochemically driven intercalation process using titania-coated iron (III) phosphate electrodes has achieved a Li + :Na + selectivity of 18,000 and near quantitative removal of Li + from a 300 mL sample of salt water over ten cycles of extraction 74 . On a larger scale, gram quantities of Li 3 PO 4 have been obtained by precipitation of a solution in which Li was concentrated 43,000 times by iterative electrically-driven membrane sieving 75 . While both these studies are exciting from the proof-of-concept view, the energy involved in simply moving the large volumes of water required to obtain viable amounts of lithium by either of these process makes them uncompetitive. For this reason it has been suggested that sufficiently-selective technology relying on passive uptake of Li + to a material submerged in the ocean was the only economically viable way to recover Li from seawater 1 . One possibility that could be suitable for such a process is direct electrochemical reduction of metallic lithium from seawater. Lithium sieves that can also serve as solid-state electrolytes based on materials of formula Li 1− x Al y Ge 2− y (PO 4 ) 3 have been shown to be robust under environmental conditions and can generate pure lithium in quantities of the order of 20–50 μg cm −2  h −1 from seawater on the laboratory scale using a variety of metal oxide anodes 7 , 58 . Rates of production of order 200 μg cm −2  h −1 from seawater have been reported using a similar process and material of formula Li 7 La 3 Zr 2 O 12 76 . If Li is collected not directly from seawater or brine, but from the more concentrated solution remaining after the principal components are removed, the hundredfold increase in Li concentration will make many of the approaches currently being investigated much more practicable 77 .

About 60% of current Li comes from hard-rock mines, chiefly in Australia, and about 30% from brines in the Andes of South America, with concentrations at least three orders of magnitude greater than seawater, and there are significant unexploited reserves that have not been fully assessed 78 .

Strontium salts

Studies of strontium recovery from seawater and brine have historically focused on methods for analysis of radioactive 90 Sr 79 , 80 , which is of significant concern in monitoring nuclear plant safety. Extraction into organic solvent 79 , 81 or a solid membrane 82 using crown ethers or tertiary amides has been found to be effective in separating strontium from similar ions in seawater. However, the cost of these Sr-complexing compounds means that considerable work in optimizing their regeneration is needed before they could be applied to commercial recovery of strontium salts.

Strontium recovery from synthetic seawater was studied using alginate microspheres 83 , 84 , which not surprisingly showed significant competition from other common cations in seawater and achieved a maximum uptake of 147 mg dm −3 of alginate. The Sr 2+ was eluted from the alginate with HCl solution. It was found to be accompanied by approximately ten times as much Cr 2+ , suggesting strongly that unless Ca 2+ is removed from seawater before treatment this would not be a viable strategy for harvesting Sr. In similar work, a magnetite/MnO 2 /fulvic acid nanocomposite was found to absorb up to 6.4 mg g −1 Sr from natural seawater 85 which was desorbed with hydrochloric acid, but the degree of separation of Sr from Ca and Mg was not assessed. Hydrothermally structured titanate nanotubes 86 have also shown a high sorbent capacity (92 mg g −1 ), but when applied to seawater were found to have a Sr 2+ :Ca 2+ selectivity of only approximately two.

Overall, the similar chemical properties of Sr and Ca mean that selective membrane rejection or resin absorption strategies are unlikely to be successful, with selective precipitation of insoluble Ca salts such as gypsum (CaSO 4 ·H 2 O) the most promising strategy to obtain a Sr-enriched solution. Key to the success of such a strategy will be the degree to which Sr is incorporated in the gypsum: if a significant proportion of the Sr is lost in this way such a strategy will be unviable.

Strontium sulfate (celestite) is used in drilling fluids for oil and gas extraction and is the principal strontium ore mined, with a production of about 200,000 tons per annum, principally in China, Iran, Mexico and Spain 87 . There is a significant market for strontium salts and there may be a brine mining opportunity from the geographical concentration of desalination plant brine in areas that are also important for oil and gas extraction.

Rubidium salts

Studies of Rb + recovery from synthetic seawater have shown that it can be effectively adsorbed using potassium cobalt hexacyanoferrate 88 or potassium copper hexacyanoferrate (KCuFC) 89 . While adsorption of Rb + was affected only slightly by high concentrations of Ca 2+ , Na + , and Mg 2+ , sorption of Rb + was significantly reduced in the presence of K + . To compensate for the effect of K + , the column adsorptive removal of Rb + was investigated with a polyacrylonitrile-encapsulated KCuFC. Using 0.1 M KCl, the adsorbed Rb + was desorbed and solution of 68% pure Rb + was produced by passing through a resorcinol formaldehyde column and subsequently leaching with HCl which kinetically separated the Rb + from the K + 90 . The commercially available hexacyanoferrate-based ion-exchange resin CsTreat, designed for removal of radioactive cesium from nuclear reactor wastewaters, has shown a high sorption capacity for Rb + from SWRO brine 2 .

Extraction of Rb into the organic phase from brine using the selective ligands BAMBP [4- tert -butyl-2-(α-methylbenzyl) phenoxide] 91 or dicyclohexano-18-crown-6 92 has been extensively investigated. BAMBP has been found to be about 12–20 times more selective for Rb + than K + (and about 100 times more selective for Cs + than K + ) 93 . Calixarenes have also been shown to be effective in selectively extracting Rb + from brines 94 .

The current market for rubidium products is relatively small and the extremely high prices for metallic Rb quoted in some previous analyses of brine-mining viability 95 apply to a miniscule market. Rubidium salts are used primarily for specialty glasses, with an annual consumption of only about 4 tons, which is supplied almost entirely as a by-product from hard-rock mining of the lithium-rich ores pollucite and lepidolite; there is currently no production of Rb salts outside of China 96 .

Boric acid and borate salts

There is a significant literature on the extraction of boron from seawater, as boron can have negative effects on plant and animal health and historically very low limits (0.5 ppm) were required for desalinated drinking water 97 . However, the absorbed or rejected borate from desalinated water treatment has only hitherto been returned to the waste stream, rather than being converted into a saleable product. The principal strategies for removing boron have been complexation of borate with a resin incorporating vicinal diol ligands, which are highly selective for borate and have little uptake of other species present in seawater 98 ; rejection of borate using RO membranes 99 ; electrodialysis 100 ; and combination methods where borate is complexed with polymers 101 or nanoparticles 97 , which can be removed from the seawater stream by UF or a coarser filtration system. Combination methods avoid the increased concentration of scale-forming ions that would otherwise arise from NF: as the pH must be above the p K a of borate in seawater (~8.6 @30 °C 102 ) in order for any of these removal methods to function, and as the scaling potential of Mg 2+ and Ca 2+ increases with pH, scaling has historically been of concern in boron rejection systems. Figure 1 suggests that boric acid could be a commercially viable product, and complexation of borate with particles that can be readily removed and regenerated with high efficiency is probably the most appropriate strategy. Boric acid has metallurgical and pharmaceutical applications and is used as a fireproofing agent for wood. Commercially boric acid and borate salts are obtained primarily from deposits of the highly water-soluble mineral borax (Na 2 B 4 O 7 ·10H 2 O), with production of about 4 million tons per year primarily from dry lakes in Turkey, the United States, and Chile 103 . In Russia and China there is significant production of boric acid from other minerals which require more significant processing, and it is industrial markets without ready access to borax where extraction of borate from seawater is likely to be most practicable 104 .

Existing brine mining technologies

Concentrate from desalination plants is still seen mainly as a waste product for disposal- a potential problem to be managed, rather than an opportunity 105 . The costs of using brine to generate useful products remains high, and terrestrial sources are still far cheaper for most products, e.g., gypsum for construction 106 . However, with advancing costs and more stringent regulation of land-based mining, and continuing improvements in water recovery leading to ever more concentrated brine, the beneficiation technologies described in this review are likely to become more competitive. With the appeal to brine producers of environmentally positive large-scale beneficial use of desalination plant concentrate, technologies are expected to evolve significantly.

As indicated in Tables 1 and 3 , seawater contains most minerals in low concentration, and while desalination concentrates may be twice this concentration, they must be both concentrated to dryness and separated into their separate components in order to afford commercially viable products. The previous section has considered potential products from seawater desalination concentrate individually. In this section, established technologies of general application to separation of chemical products from seawater desalination brine will be considered on a process basis.

The main technologies applied or proposed to mine minerals from seawater are evaporation with sequential precipitation, selective sequential precipitation, membrane separation, electrodialysis, membrane distillation and crystallization (MDC), and adsorption/desorption/crystallization 10 . In all these technologies, the concentration of the metal targeted for extraction is first increased to the level of supersaturation to enable their crystallization. In all these technologies except the last, recovery of minerals requires that the solubility product of the salt needs to be less than the enriched ionic product of the constituent ions. Only the method of adsorption/desorption/crystallization is not dependent on concentration of the brine. It has been more frequently proposed for obtaining minerals containing less common elements such as Li, Sr, Rb, and U 57 , 85 , 88 , 107 . Adsorbents allow these minerals to be adsorbed with other minerals and later quantitatively desorbed and crystallized.

One recurring outcome of our assessments of proposed brine mining operations is that targeting a single product is less viable than integrated processes which allow the isolation of a number of commercial products from a process stream.

Evaporation with sequential precipitation

The purpose of the process of salt solidification and recovery is to selectively recover high purity beneficial salts from the desalination plant concentrate. Technologies most commonly used currently are based on fractional crystallization and precipitation. Salts are crystallized either through evaporation of concentrate, or, within limits, by temperature control or alteration of the solvent quality 108 .

Minerals precipitate from seawater via evaporation in the order shown in Fig. 2 . Calcium carbonate (aragonite or calcite) and calcium sulfate (gypsum) are most easily extracted, followed by sodium chloride (table salt). The remaining salts are precipitated in the last 2.5% of evaporation and in the conventional salt solidification process of seawater brines (Fig. 3 ) are deposited as mixed salts (e.g., MgCl 2 .KCl·H 2 O, carnallite) which require further processing and separation before use.

Sequence of precipitation of minerals from seawater, adapted with permission from Voutchkov and Kaiser 180 .

Schematic of salt solidification and recovery system, adapted with permission from Voutchkov and Kaiser 180 .

Solar evaporation in ponds is the oldest method for extraction of minerals such as sodium chloride from seawater and desalination plant concentrate. Evaporation ponds are designed as a system of shallow pools to concentrate and crystallize desalination plant brine. Evaporation pond systems are relatively easy to construct, require low maintenance and minimal mechanical equipment. Significant land area is however required, and the period for brine concentration and crystallization can be quite lengthy—typically at least two years of operation is required before product is obtained. To prevent groundwater pollution, the ponds must be lined with clay, poly(vinyl chloride), or polyethylene materials 109 . The main expenditure for solar evaporation ponds is the cost of land as such ponds are very land-intensive. Only minerals with high content (e.g., NaCl) can be economically recovered through this process alone, but this is the essential first step in producing bitterns highly enriched in potassium and magnesium minerals, as well as bromine.

Thermal evaporation and crystallization can be applied in an analogous manner to isolate first scale-forming salts, and then relatively pure sodium chloride, from seawater or desalination brine: however, the energy costs of such processes are prohibitively high and the process is commercially viable only for high-value salt intended for human consumption 110 .

Potash (MOP, potassium chloride), magnesium chloride, magnesium sulfate, magnesium hydroxide and bromine, may all be produced at a plausible cost for commercial production from bitterns remaining from solar salt production by thermal treatment 111 , 112 , 113 , 114 . While the bitterns remaining after crystallization of sodium chloride are more highly concentrated in magnesium and potassium salts than desalination brines, the mixed salts that precipitate on further concentration require further separation and chemical treatment in order to produce saleable products 115 .

The second stage bitterns remaining after crystallization of these minerals can be economically exploited for the recovery of rarer elements (specifically rubidium, for which bitterns remaining from potash extraction were historically an important source in the United States of America) 116 . Production of minerals from salt making bitterns has recently been reviewed by Bagastyo et al. 117 .

Selective sequential precipitation

Addition of counter-ions to produce insoluble salts can alter the sequence of fractional precipitation shown in Figs. 2 and 3 , selectively removing a specific mineral from the concentrate: for example, Mg 2+ as Mg(OH) 2 or Ca 2+ as CaCO 3 . Such magnesium and calcium salts have been selectively precipitated from desalination brine using several existing commercial technologies and assessed as commercial commodities 118 .

Chemical precipitation has been used to recover salts from seawater and RO reject brines using sodium carbonate and sodium phosphate 119 . Carbonate addition gave recovery of between 89 and 96% of the Ca 2+ and between 86 and 91% of the Mg in seawater and two RO brines. Phosphate gave a similar recovery rate of Ca 2+ , but a lower recovery of Mg 2+ , and had much more variable results between seawater and brines. In seawater, sodium phosphate led to 98% recovery of calcium and 47% of magnesium while in concentrate, these rates were 75% and 24%, respectively 119 . Approximately 2 kg of calcium and magnesium salts were precipitated from concentrate per 1 kg of sodium carbonate used, while only 1.43 kg of calcium and magnesium salts could be obtained from seawater per 1 kg of sodium carbonate, indicating the greater cost-effectiveness of treating desalination concentrate 120 . In a similar study, a seawater RO brine containing 830 mg dm −3 Ca and 2620 mg dm −3 Mg was treated with 14 g dm −3 Na 2 CO 3 at 25 °C, removing 94% of Ca and 70% of Mg; at 65 °C, due to the inverse solubility behavior of CaCO 3 and Mg(OH) 2 , 8.5 g dm −3 of Na 2 CO 3 removed 95% of Ca and 82% of Mg 120 . Attempts to push extraction to higher levels by increasing pH were ineffective, despite commercial modeling software suggesting that this would be effective. In addition, this research indicates that the recovery of calcium and magnesium is hindered by antiscalants and other metallic ions in the reject brine. To compensate for the inhibitory effect of antiscalants on precipitation of calcium and magnesium, the reject brine was further concentrated by electrodialysis (ED), reducing the amount of antiscalants in the brine. A range of 0.35–14 g dm −3 of sodium carbonate and 0.85 g dm −3 of sodium hydroxide were used to maximize the removal of calcium and magnesium. The residual from the ED-RO process contained 10 mg dm −3 of calcium and magnesium and the overall removal efficiency of these minerals from brine exceeded 95% 121 .

A further precipitation technology patented by GEO-Processors has found application in Australia and the United States. Through the SALPROC process, salts are precipitated through a combination of chemical reactions with repeated evaporation and cooling steps. In this way, salts such as magnesium carbonate, calcium carbonate and gypsum are recovered from concentrate 122 , 123 .

Careful control of pH and stoichiometry is needed to precipitate CaCO 3 without co-precipitation of Mg(OH) 2 . As separation of precipitates into relatively pure fractions of a single salt is required for most applications, there is little scope for technologies that precipitate Ca and Mg salts simultaneously. These technologies are all unlikely to be economically competitive for extraction of minerals from brine, due to the requirement of addition of stoichiometric (or greater than stoichiometric) quantities of other reagents in order to generate the product(s) of interest. These required reagents, such as calcium hydroxide, sodium carbonate, sodium phosphate and sodium hydroxide, tend to be only slightly less costly than the relatively low-value target minerals.

Membrane-based separations

In seawater and brine, elements of greater value and lower concentration may exist as cationic or anionic species. Some of the high-value metals that are frequently present as cationic species in seawater and brine include copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium. In contrast, uranium, platinum, molybdenum, and vanadium are present in brine as anionic species. Table 3 presents the concentration of key rarer elements contained in seawater and the rejection of these elements by NF and SWRO membranes. As seen from this table, NF brine has a high rejection of most key high-value elements except for lithium and rubidium. Usually, NF membranes reject over 85% of the calcium and magnesium in the seawater, with a similar rejection of other multivalent ions, and only reject 15–20% of sodium, chloride, and other monovalent ions.

Brine can be further concentrated by membrane osmotically-assisted RO when the concentrations of the minerals approach saturation 124 or by Forward Osmosis (FO) membranes 125 . The technical limit of such methods is the point of crystallization of salts from the brine; they become uncompetitive with thermal concentration methods at a slightly lower TDS. Membrane-based methods will be treated in more detail below.

Electrodialysis (ED)

Electrodialysis (ED) can be applied for brine concentration and is applied commercially for concentration of seawater in Japan, Korea, and Kuwait 126 . Electrodialysis is fundamentally more energy-consuming than membrane-based methods that rely on movement of water though a membrane rather than the movement of ions through a membrane and has almost twice the power consumption per ton of salt produced of the most advanced membrane-based methods 127 , 128 .

Electrodialysis has however an additional benefit, as in combination with selective monovalent cation and anion permeable membranes, it can be used to separate monovalent ions, such as Na + and Cl − , from divalent ions, such as Ca 2+ , Mg 2+ , and SO 4 2- 129 . This produces both a concentrated solution enriched in NaCl and an NaCl-depleted solution with Mg 2+ concentration which is four to six times higher than that in seawater. These solutions can then be treated by other methods to obtain solid product. Evaporation of the NaCl-rich stream will obtain crystalline NaCl with greater purity and a lower energy input than direct evaporation of brine, while Mg 2+ can be precipitated as Mg(OH) 2 from the Mg-enriched stream. This has been done electrolytically by decomposing water to H 2 and OH − , giving Mg(OH) 2 of ~99% purity 130 . Mg(OH) 2 can also be obtained by increasing pH to 11 by the addition of Ca(OH) 2 or NaOH. While Ca 2+ can inhibit the precipitation of Mg(OH) 2 , this can be avoided by pre-treatment with an appropriate stoichiometric amount of Na 2 CO 3 to precipitate CaCO 3 , or by deaeration at an appropriate pH to remove CO 3 2− as CO 2 130 .

Appropriate combination of cation-selective and anion-selective membranes can separate a brine stream into product streams where the divalent cations and anions are sent in different directions 131 : e.g., where one stream can be used to obtain the sulfate component of the brine as Na 2 SO 4 , and another can obtain the calcium component of the brine as CaCl 2 . While this additional flexibility in obtaining desired mineral products would be of great value, at the present time the energy requirements of such systems are prohibitively high for high TDS solutions (G. Qile, personal communication).

Ongoing development of monovalent cation-permeable and anion-permeable membranes which can separate monovalent and divalent ions has the prospect to improve ED as a process for mineral recovery. Membrane research is expected to yield further improvements in permeable membranes sensitive to specific individual ions, for example, Li + 66 , for coupling to ED, but the energy requirements for electrodialysis in concentrated brines remain such that only high value components will be of potential interest.

Membrane distillation crystallization (MDC)

Membrane distillation crystallization (MDC) is an innovative technique for implementation of membrane technology in crystallization processes 132 . MDC exploits the excellent ability of membrane distillation (MD) process, a thermally-driven operation, to concentrate the feed solution up to supersaturation 133 . In MDC, the saturated solute is crystallized out from the solution when the solution reaches the saturation state 134 . Hence the system attains suitable conditions for crystallization. The advantages of MDC include well-controlled nucleation and growth kinetics, fast crystallization rates and reduced induction time, and production of high-quality crystals 135 .

MDC has drawn attention as an attractive alternative method for water recovery as well as for crystal production, especially for high-value products 136 . MDC inherits all of the benefits embedded in MD, such as lower operating temperatures and energy requirements 137 . MDC is generally used at temperatures ranging from 30 to 85 °C, which is below conventional distillation 138 . This offers the possibility to use low-grade heat (e.g., solar and geothermal) or waste heat (e.g., surplus heat from industrial processes) for operation 139 , 140 , which can reduce the cost of the process significantly and also offers a “carbon-neutral” technique for processing different streams 141 .

The most typical membranes used in existing MDC processes are those fabricated from polymeric materials containing polypropylene, polyvinylidene fluoride, polytetrafluoroethylene, and polyethersulfone. Flat-sheet and hollow fiber membrane modules are commonly applied 136 . The flat-sheet membrane module has the advantages of simple structure, convenient cleaning, and low cost, but the specific surface area and packing densities are lower than in the hollow fiber membrane module. In principle, all MD configurations can be used as MDC 142 , including direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD), air gap membrane distillation, sweeping gas membrane distillation, and vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) 142 . The optimum configuration should be determined depending on feed solution and the operative conditions. DCMD is the main applied configuration of MDC due to its simplicity and low cost but VMD is preferred to achieve a high degree of concentration. In addition to these traditional MDC types, novel configurations have been also investigated, including submerged MDC 143 , percrystallization 144 , bubble MDC 145 , and MDC coupled with cooling crystallization 146 .

When MDC is applied to brines from seawater desalination plants, it leads to reduction in brine discharge, flexibility in site selection, production of dry salts of high quality and controlled properties, and increased production in fresh water 147 , 148 , 149 . There have been many reports on the use of MDC to recover minerals from either natural or synthetic seawater brines 138 . MDC has been widely applied to produce NaCl crystals 145 , 150 and has been also used to harvest MgSO 4 151 , CaCO 3 152 , CaSO 4 153 , and Na 2 SO 4 143 . Moreover, MDC had potential to increase the recovery of fresh water by controlling the membrane scaling due to mineral crystallization 137 , 151 . The introduction of MDC units on both brines in a NF-SWRO system increases the water recovery so much that it can reach values higher than 90% and also allows the production of NaCl, CaCO 3 , and MgSO 4 , etc. 154 . Recent research focus on MDC has shifted to recover more valuable components such as Li 155 and Rb 156 .

Although there are many advantages in MDC for mineral recovery from brines, it also has shortcomings associated with membrane fouling and pore wetting 135 , 157 . The lack of appropriate membrane materials and modules is also a critical issue 133 . Unlike other membrane systems such as NF and RO, scale-up of MDC is still difficult, which results from insufficient information and experience 157 . Due to these challenges, most work on MDC has been carried out on bench scales and only a handful of experiments have been done on pilot scales 148 , 149 . In addition, a serious consideration in application of MDC to brine mining is that it has no inherent mechanism for separating out particular crystalline species from a complex mixture such as seawater, so cannot produce pure minerals except for those with clearly separated crystallization points, such as NaCl and CaSO 4 .

Adsorption/desorption

Minerals are naturally found in low concentration in seawater, which is a major reason why land mining has generally been economically favored. Separating most individual minerals by precipitation or crystallization given their low concentrations in seawater is difficult with existing technologies. Thus, adsorbent materials that can selectively bind particular chemical species in solution have been an attractive goal for research 10 . Once adsorption is complete, the selected mineral must be desorbed and precipitated to form the crystalized salt. The desorbed solution may contain other minerals which in turn need to be removed through applying adsorbents specifically to these minerals. Very high selectivity is required for adsorption/desorption processes, due to the low concentration of the target ions relative to the main species present in seawater. In assessing the viability of the processes, it is necessary to consider the operational costs of regenerating the adsorbent material, which will usually require the use of stoichiometric quantities of acid, or very much greater than stoichiometric quantities of fresh water. While increased concentration of the feed brine will enhance the extent and rate of adsorption of dissolved ions to the adsorbent, it will not improve selectivity or significantly reduce the relative amount of reagent needed for desorption. Adsorption studies of potassium 45 , lithium 61 , strontium 86 , and rubidium 89 have already been discussed above with reference to those elements. Branched polyethyleneimine (PEI) macromolecules have been suggested as one class of adsorbents with selectivity for metal ions in seawater, specifically Cu 2+ and UO 2 2+ 3 . PEI has also been embedded in high-capacity chelating resins and membrane absorbers have been studied for selective recovery of boron from seawater and brine 158 . It has been suggested that to avoid the high energy costs of pumping seawater or brine, adsorbent material could be placed directly in a static body of seawater or brine and removed when saturated 1 . In one embodiment of this approach to selectively extract Rb + , a submersible device combining membrane distillation to produce a concentrated brine gave ~87% recovery of Rb + from a spiked solution of SWRO brine containing 5 ppm Rb 159 .

Brine concentration and nanofiltration: the keys to brine mining

Two key transformative technologies are discussed in this chapter: Nanofiltration (NF), to separate brine into mixed dissolved ion stream into mono-valent enriched and multi-(di-)valent enriched streams; and Membrane Brine Concentration (MBC), to concentrate the brine into higher salinity in a more energy-efficient way than a conventional thermal evaporator. While individually these technologies can improve the performance of brine mining operations, the combination of NF and MBC technologies can make a significant impact on the feasibility of brine mining, with an electricity consumption of 75–79 kWh per ton of NaCl isolated calculated in comparison with 165 kWh per ton salt for commercial ED systems 127 , 160 .

Nanofiltration (NF)

The single most important technology for improving brine mining is selective nanofiltration membranes which have a significantly greater rejection of divalent ions than monovalent ions. These allow separation of one stream, NF reject, with a significantly higher concentration of divalent ions such as Ca 2+ , Mg 2+ , and SO 4 2− , and a second stream, NF permeate, with greatly reduced concentrations of these ions. In terms of any process aimed at recovering a particular mineral, this reduces the volume of liquid that must be treated in order to obtain the mineral and reduces the number of interfering species. Processes for extracting bromine, for example, need only be applied to the permeate stream, while processes for extracting magnesium hydroxide need only be applied to the reject stream, in each case using reduced quantities of reagents for pH adjustment and requiring smaller volumes of liquid to be processed.

In application of methods such as MDC or solar evaporation following NF, concentration of NF reject would not form significant quantities of the mixed salts kainite (KMg(SO 4 )Cl·3H 2 O) or carnallite (KCl.MgCl 2 ·6H 2 O)—which would require further processing to obtain saleable mineral products—but would lead directly to the precipitation of saleable bischofite (MgCl 2 ·6H 2 O) well-separated from the other precipitated salt products. Similarly, on the permeate side, the removal of Mg makes it possible for direct precipitation of sylvite (KCl) rather than mixed salts with magnesium. As the divalent ions are the principal scale forming species, their removal into the reject stream also makes it possible to concentrate the permeate stream to higher levels by brine concentration, reducing further the volume which must be handled in brine mining operations.

Exemplary mineral recovery steps on the NF reject stream could be as follows:

Recovery of CaSO 4 ·2H 2 O (gypsum). Because CaSO 4 is the most likely scale-forming ion in the reject of NF applied to seawater, the typical saturation at NF reject will easily exceed 100% and could be up to 400% depending on the composition in the raw seawater, NF recovery and ion rejection ratios. Although antiscalant is usually dosed to prevent CaSO 4 scale deposition, several technologies, e.g., Membrane Crystallization, might be considered to harvest CaSO 4 .

MBC as an intermediate step, which produces a less saline stream (to be recycled to NF system or to be considered as additional water production if the considered MBC is a dewatering (e.g., RO) type) and a more saline stream (limited only by the scale deposition risk).

Evaporation ponds and sequential bittern concentration steps to recover NaCl, MgCl 2 ·6H 2 O, CaCl 2 ·2H 2 O, and so on.

A commercial-scale project is being undertaken by the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) to construct a NF plant in Shoaiba, Saudi Arabia ( https://idadesal.org/ida-academy-webinar-on-innovation-in-desalination-brine-mining-with-swcc/ ). The main purpose is to harvest magnesium for two major beneficial uses. The first is to for supplementation of drinking water. There have been numerous studies which have found a link between Mg content in drinking water and human health, with low Mg content in drinking water being linked to negative outcomes in bone and cardiovascular health 161 , 162 and high content giving more positive outcomes in diabetes and cancer treatment 163 , 164 . Desalination product water is usually deficient in Mg 2+ (<1 ppm) and the level of 15 ppm Mg 2+ associated with improved health outcomes is being targeted by installing a multi-stage NF system with inter-stage dilution 165 , similar to the system proposed by Birnhack et al. 166 . As the Mg 2+ in seawater is vastly higher than 15 ppm (~1500 ppm), in comparison to the capacity of the seawater intake in a desalination plant, only a small fraction of seawater or brine needs to be treated to extract the required Mg for this post-treatment. When 400,000 m 3 per day desalinated water is considered, for example, where its seawater intake capacity would be 1,000,000 m 3 per day with 40% of overall recovery, for example, the intake seawater contains ~1500 ton per day Mg. 15 ppm of 400,000 m 3 per day indicates 6 tons per day of Mg is required, which can be harvested by treating only 0.4% of the intake seawater. In a practical design, due to non-perfect rejection of Mg ion in NF membranes, around 0.8% of intake seawater will be treated by multi-stage NF system to harvest and supply Mg to the desalination product water.

The second beneficial use is to supply the Mg-enriched low-salinity brine as a liquid fertilizer. Many acidic soils contain very low levels of soluble magnesium, which is essential for photosynthesis, and crop yields generally increase by of order 10% when magnesium fertilizer is added 167 . Certain tropical fruits, such as mango, are more heavily dependent on magnesium levels, with fruit quality declining if magnesium is deficient ( www.ks-minerals-and-agriculture.com/uken/fertiliser/advisory_service/crops/mango.html ; www.mango.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Magnesium_Fertilization_Final_Report_Eng.pdf ). Irrigated farms in the vicinity of desalination plants, especially for tropical fruit and at large scales, can realize significant cost savings by replacing commercial magnesium sulfate fertilizer with a liquid fertilizer system utilizing the Mg-enriched low-salinity brine from a multi-stage NF system.

Membrane brine concentration (MBC)

A second key technology to make brine mining more attractive is membrane brine concentration. Davenport et al. 168 have reported that a membrane-based technology would require less than half of the energy consumption by conventional thermal evaporation technology in the application of hypersaline brine desalination. In an example of concentrating 70,000 mg dm −3 feed brine to 250,000 mg dm −3 , they estimated specific energy consumption (SEC) of 24 kWh m ‒3 with two-stage MVC, while it would drop to 7.3 kWh m ‒3 with two-stage high pressure RO (HPRO). They indicated the maximum operation pressure for typical SWRO as 80 bar and analyzed two scenarios—one with HPRO up to 150 bar (double the current operating limit) and the other with HPRO up to 300 bar (due to around 290 bar of osmotic pressure at 250,000 mg dm −3 ).

Practically, the maximum operating pressure of SWRO is a function of temperature as well, which varies between 70 and 82.7 bar. A higher temperature allows for a lower maximum operating pressure in order to minimize the risk from membrane compaction. This penalty could be partially moderated with improved membrane materials, e.g., with new core tube material. There are commercial HPRO membranes of up to 120–124 bar available in the market, such as Hydranautics’ PRO-XP1 ( http://pureaqua.com/content/pdf/hydranautics-pro-xp1-membrane.pdf ) (Fig. 4 ) and Dupont (Filmtec)’s XUS180808 ( www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/water-solutions/public/documents/en/45-D01736-en.pdf ). Ultra-high-pressure RO of up to 200 bar has been reported in special applications, e.g., landfill leachate treatment as early as 2000 169 , and currently PWS (Pacific Water Solutions) is working on the same pressure range ( https://pws-water.com/project-ultra-hgh-pressure-ro-uhpro-membrane-module-development-for-international-desalination-company/ ), which membranes are currently being tested by SWCC-DTRI ( https://idadesal.org/ida-academy-webinar-on-innovation-in-desalination-brine-mining-with-swcc/ ).

Comparison of temperature and pressure operation limits for a conventional SWRO membrane and LG Chem SWRO membranes ( www.lgwatersolutions.com/en/technical-document/technical-bulletins-tsb , technical service bulletin 106) and Hydranautics PRO-XP (HPRO) membrane (Hydranautics, PRO-XP1 membrane specification, ( http://pureaqua.com/content/pdf/hydranautics-pro-xp1-membrane.pdf )).

Even though there are continuous efforts in the development and application of (U)HPRO, the practical application of (U)HPRO in a large scale will be challenging due to the need for the expensive materials in pump, pipe, valve, instruments and so on. A very high operating pressure presents an additional difficulty in materials where hypersaline brine is already a big challenge. In order to overcome this issue of very high pressures, osmotically assisted RO (OARO) has gained attention from many researchers and industrial players. There have been a number of proposals to overcome the limit of osmotic pressure when RO is applied 170 , 171 , 172 , 173 . The principle of OARO is to reduce an osmotic pressure gradient across the membrane by allowing a certain salinity brine flow on the conventional permeate side of the membrane. The feed to reject side of the membrane is pressurized while the permeate side has much lower pressure, and if the pressure difference between the two sides are higher than the osmotic pressure difference, mostly water molecules rather than other solutes (such as Na and Cl) will pass through the semi-permeable membrane (e.g., RO, FO, or pressure retarded osmosis), thus the feed side becomes more concentrated and the permeate side becomes more diluted. It is possible that even NF membranes could be used, depending on the solute of interest to be concentrated on the feed side.

The typical configurations of OARO are illustrated in Fig. 5 . A single OARO is shown in (a) where the flow could be either co-current (a1) or counter-current (a2). When a series of OARO is considered, both (b) and (c) could be considered, where (c) has at least 1 recycling stream inside OARO 124 , 174 . As an example, if (b) configuration is considered, the leftward arrow on the right top (brown) could be considered as seawater, which flow rate increases and concentration is getting less through OAROs while receiving water flux from lower side of the diagram, thus the leftward arrow on the left end (blue), which could be SWRO feed is already diluted with increased flow rate, thus higher recovery of fresh water in SWRO can be expected. The rightward arrow on the left end (orange), which could be SWRO reject, is getting concentrated with losing its flow rates through OAROs, and the final rightward arrow (red) will be higher concentration with less flow rate compared to the typical SWRO reject. In this way, the concept of MBC is achieved within a limited maximum operating pressure.

Osmotically-assisted Reverse Osmosis (OARO) configurations. a Example of co-current (a1) and counter-current (a2) flows; b Example of multiple OARO in series, c example when OARO includes at least one recycling stream. (The block sky-blue arrows indicate the flux of permeate (usually water) thus indicating the pressure gradient on the membrane. Solid arrow color indicates salinity (higher towards red, lower towards sky-blue) and the thickness indicates flow rate).

Peters and Hankins 175 analyzed several OARO processes and compared their theoretical energy consumption to multi-stage RO (MSRO, which is the combination of SWRO and HPRO in series). As the membrane modeling of OARO is similar to that of pressure assisted FO (PAFO), they adopted the model of B. Kim. et al. 176 , for water flux calculation and the model of J. Kim, et al. 177 , for solute flux calculation. Two scenarios were considered: 1) concentrating 35,000 mg dm −3 to 125,000 mg.dm −3 and 2) concentrating 70,000 mg.dm −3 to 125,000 mg dm −3 . The theoretical SEC comparison showed that MSRO consumes less energy than OARO, where SECs by MSRO were 3.32 and 5.16 kWh m –3 while SECs by OARO were 4.09 and 6.37 kWh m –3 for scenario 1 and 2, respectively. The reduced energy efficiency was could be explained by the increase in entropy arising from dilution and mixing of the saline streams in OARO 174 However, it should be noted that Peters and Hankins 175 considered 48.3 bar as the maximum operating pressure of OARO as per the earlier study by other researchers on Pressure Retarded Reverse Osmosis (PRO) with commercially available TFC FO membrane. Membranes operating at 70 bar are already commercially available for OARO without additional high-cost components (e.g., a porous steel plate as feed spacer). Toyobo has a commercial membrane product for brine concentration purpose (Toyobo, FB10155FI) and FTS H2O also has a commercial product for OARO (FTSHBCR-01/04, https//:ftsh2o.com/products/hbcr-high-brine-concentration-and-recovery/ ). DTRI-SWCC has tested Toyobo’s HFF membrane product for more than nine months, and was able to concentrate 110,000 ppm HPRO reject (operated at 120 bar with Hydranautics HPRO membrane) to 170,000 ppm with two-stage OARO (70 bar with Toyobo HFF BC membrane) continuously and up to 220,000 ppm with three-stage OARO. The commercially available FTSHBCR membranes are already delivered to DTRI-SWCC and are undergoing testing long-term operation, with a pilot facility designed to concentrate 78,000 ppm SWRO reject to 220,000 ppm with three-stage OARO ( https://idadesal.org/ida-academy-webinar-on-innovation-in-desalination-brine-mining-with-swcc/ ).

Comparing the two MBC candidates, HPRO could be more energy efficient, while OARO may reduce the capital and maintenance cost thanks to its operation at relatively lower pressure (70 bar). Also, the challenges on HPRO becomes much larger when higher levels of concentration are required, because much higher pressure is required, while for OARO, higher concentration forces to increase its number of stages but there is no technical challenge from high pressure. Therefore, further studies at DTRI-SWCC aim to determine an optimal concentration by HPRO, by OARO, and by the combination of the two methods.

Combination of nanofiltration and membrane brine concentration (NF-RO-MBC)

The idea of combining the above two key technologies was recently proposed by DTRI-SWCC 168 , 178 . The key concept of applying NF upstream of RO and MBC as the core of an integrated facility for seawater concentrate mining is illustrated in Fig. 6 127 , 165 . When “towards Zero Liquid Discharge” is discussed, it is essential to secure economic feasibility to realize an idea to a real life on a commercial scale. Therefore, the principal idea in this NF-RO-MBC system is to produce two commercially valuable concentrate steams in addition to a higher recovery of freshwater production. The high selectivity nature of the NF system is adopted to make the seawater which has mixed dissolved ions in nature into two streams—a high purity monovalent ions steam in its permeate and a highly concentrated multivalent ions stream in its retentate. With the following RO and/or MBC systems, both streams could be concentrated further to the level of concentration where downstream industries could utilize it as a source brine for their processes or where the following mineral harvesting steps could become economically feasible. The pilot plant using commercial-size membranes was successfully demonstrated to produce concentrated multivalent ions steam of about 90,000 mg dm −3 with high concentrations of divalent ions, i.e., 3.40 times Ca 2+ , 5.16 times Mg 2+ , and 6.56 times SO 4 2− compared to these ions in seawater and NF feed, and to produce the high-purity highly-concentrated monovalent ions stream where the sum of Na and Cl portion in the TDS of about 170,000 mg dm −3 is increased to about 96.85% from 85.98% in seawater 127 .

Integrated application of Nanofiltration, Reverse-Osmosis and Brine Concentration for separation and recovery of valuable minerals.

Summary and outlook

Since as long ago as the 19th century the imagination of researchers has been seized by the potential of obtaining useful minerals and metals from the sea. Exploiting desalination concentrate, rather than direct use of seawater, is necessarily going to be more energetically favorable: the energy that would have otherwise removed the amount of water produced by the desalination plant has already been expended. Thus the expansion of seawater desalination in recent decades brings this longstanding dream a step closer to commercial reality. Research developments around the world are taking further small steps in this direction, despite a perception that resource recovery from brine may be entering a “trough of disillusionment” 125 . Processing large volumes of seawater desalination brine to extract a single component—with the exception of NaCl—will be less competitive than integrated processes designed to obtain several commercial species from concentrate. For a long time to come, it is likely that commercial utilization of the non-NaCl components of desalination brine will depend on the available market for NaCl, as the challenges and costs of extracting the other mineral components from bitterns in which they are highly enriched are so much less than those faced in direct treatment of brines.

The most important technologies for economic use of products from desalination plant concentrate are technologies for more economic separation and technologies for more economic concentration. In terms of separation, a long sequence of complex steps treating the entire volume of concentrate 95 is unlikely ever to be viable, so the most promising separation technologies are those, such as NF, that separate the brine into streams enriched/depleted in entire classes of constituents with the least possible input of energy and reagents. In terms of concentration, rapid advances in OARO technology that allow the application of low-energy membrane-based methods of concentration to ever more concentrated brines are a transformative development for sustainable mining of seawater.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Basel Abu Sharkh, Ahmad A. Al-Amoudi, Mohammed Farooque, Christopher M. Fellows, Seungwon Ihm, Sangho Lee, Sheng Li & Nikolay Voutchkov

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Sharkh, B.A., Al-Amoudi, A.A., Farooque, M. et al. Seawater desalination concentrate—a new frontier for sustainable mining of valuable minerals. npj Clean Water 5 , 9 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41545-022-00153-6

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A Review on Hybrid Fiber-Reinforced Self-compacting Concrete: Properties & Challenges

• Review Paper
• Published: 31 May 2024

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• Hemant B. Dahake 1 , 2 &
• Bhushan H. Shinde 1  

The material known as Hybrid Fiber Reinforced Self-Compacting Concrete (HF SCC) combines the advantages of SCC with several fiber kinds, including glass, steel, and synthetic fibers. This article provides an overview of HF SCC-related research and findings, focusing on new and challenging features, practical applications, sustainability, and design and technology developed for the HF SCC standards. The HF SCC study investigated the impact of fiber, fiber fraction, and composite design on performance, strength, toughness, and durability. Clinical studies have shown that adding fiber to SCC improves its mechanical properties including tensile strength, fracture toughness, etc. The interactions between the fibers and other components of the concrete matrix were analyzed to understand the mechanisms behind the development of HF SCC. Sustainability factors and environmental considerations are important in the development and usage of products. We conducted a life cycle valuation to assess the environmental influence of HF SCC and explore the usage of recycled materials and sustainable practices. The outcomes highlight the potential of HF SCCs to contribute to sustainable development by reducing carbon emissions, reducing waste and improving resource efficiency. Key outcomes from the above discourse include the recognition of Hybrid Fiber Self-Compacting Concrete (HFSCC) as a promising solution in construction, owing to its ability to enhance mechanical properties through the incorporation of various fiber types. Extensive research has deepened our understanding of HFSCC’s behavior and operation, highlighting its efficacy across diverse applications. However, further exploration is warranted to address research gaps, particularly in understanding penetration, shrinkage, and resistance to environmental factors. Promoting HFSCC adoption, advancing sustainable practices, and standardizing design and manufacturing processes are crucial steps towards realizing its full potential in the construction industry.

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Dahake, H.B., Shinde, B.H. A Review on Hybrid Fiber-Reinforced Self-compacting Concrete: Properties & Challenges. Iran J Sci Technol Trans Civ Eng (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40996-024-01480-z

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Received : 24 December 2023

Accepted : 17 May 2024

Published : 31 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40996-024-01480-z

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