Integrated Water Treatment Technologies: Desalination, Industrial Effluents, and Circular Resource Recovery
A Special Issue of Processes (ISSN 2227-9717) belonging to the section "Environmental and Green Processes".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 November 2026 | Viewed by 250
Editor
Interests: water treatment; desalination; membrane technology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Global water scarcity, driven by rapid urbanization, industrialization, and climate variability, is accelerating the need for transformative water treatment solutions. Conventional, single-purpose systems are no longer sufficient to meet the increasing demand for water, energy, and resource efficiency. Integrated water treatment technologies are emerging as a key pathway to simultaneously address water supply, wastewater management, and resource recovery within a circular economy framework.
This Special Issue focuses on the development and optimization of integrated systems that combine desalination, industrial effluent treatment, and resource recovery. Membrane-based desalination processes, particularly reverse osmosis, play a central role in augmenting water supply, while advanced treatment strategies enable the reuse of complex industrial wastewaters. At the same time, the recovery of valuable resources—such as nutrients, energy, and critical materials—from concentrated streams and brines is gaining increasing relevance. Key challenges persist, including membrane fouling and scaling, high energy consumption, brine management, process integration, and economic feasibility. Addressing these limitations requires innovative approaches such as hybrid systems, energy-efficient designs, renewable energy coupling, digitalization, and advanced process control.
This Special Issue welcomes high-quality contributions on, but not limited to: integrated and hybrid treatment systems; desalination technologies; industrial wastewater reuse; use of regenerated water; resource recovery and valorization; brine management; energy optimization; techno-economic analysis; and real-scale applications. Submissions that demonstrate novel concepts, system integration, and practical implementation toward sustainable and circular water systems are particularly encouraged.
Dr. German Eduardo Devora
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Processes is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- seawater desalination
- reverse osmosis (RO) membranes
- membrane fouling and scaling
- advanced membrane processes (NF/UF/FO)
- industrial wastewater reuse
- zero liquid discharge (ZLD)
- brine treatment and valorization
- energy consumption (kWh/m3)
- hybrid desalination systems
- circular water economy
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