2/2/2026 Taylor Parks
Written by Taylor Parks
This past September, MechSE Associate Professor Kyle Smith and members from his research group, including mechanical engineering PhD candidate Vu Do and aerospace engineering masters student Tamer Saatci, qualified for the XPRIZE Water Scarcity competition, a multi-year global competition focused on creating reliable, sustainable, and affordable seawater desalination solutions to drive widespread clean water access.
XPRIZE, the world's leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions to solve humanity's grand challenges, described the $119 million XPRIZE Water Scarcity competition as the largest XPRIZE in history. XPRIZE Water Scarcity is sponsored by the Mohamed bin Zayed Water Initiative.
Smith’s team, Forward-Looking Interdisciplinary New-Technology Team (FLINT), is one of 143 selected from a pool of more than 670 teams across 86 countries. Teams have been organized into two tracks: reimagining system-level innovation (A) and developing novel materials and methods for saltwater separation (B). FLINT, which is focusing on the battery-based desalination method that Smith and his lab have worked to develop over the last decade or so (see his recent webinar here), is one of 50 teams in Track B.
“One aspect that is unique about [XPRIZE Water Scarcity] is that it is aimed toward seawater desalination specifically,” Smith said, noting that some of his lab’s past work used a sodium chloride solution for feed water. “Now we’re using a [more realistic] mixture of sodium chloride, potassium chloride, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, and other trace ions.”
The feed water mixture is especially important to the team’s testing process, as their desalination method relies on the absorption of cations by a solid-state intercalation mechanism. While each type of salt separates into cations and anions in the water, not all cations absorb in the same way.
“In fact, some cations, depending on what kind of condition you operate the cell in, could actually cause degradation of the cell,” Smith explained. “Some of the research we’re doing now aims to understand under what conditions to operate the system in order to make it function reliably.”
Currently, teams in both tracks are conducting field testing and validation for their proposed solutions. One of the goals of XPRIZE Water Scarcity is for the seawater desalination solution to demonstrate strong durability. Indeed, the winning track B team stands to earn $8 million for pioneering a novel, durable desalination material or method that can operate for at least 10 years.
For FLINT, this means demonstrating durability better than that of reverse osmosis.
“Reverse osmosis systems are very mature compared to the technology that we have presently developed, so beating the durability is not a small feat to achieve,” Smith said. “Not only are we attempting to minimize degradation of the system while we’re testing it, but we’re also doing so-called accelerated durability testing, where we’re subjecting the system to higher levels of driving force than the device would normally experience. This includes the pH level, the magnitude of the current, the temperature of the solution, and the introduction of various contaminants.”
The team will use the results of the accelerated durability testing to isolate mechanisms of degradation and develop operational-, design-, and material-specific strategies to mitigate the loss in performance. They will also be exploring means of increasing their rate of production of desalinated water—for example, by varying the current applied to the electrochemical cell.
Teams who advance beyond validation, which concludes in mid-March, will become semifinalists.
“I hope that we will gain a better understanding of what the real barriers are to our technology proceeding in translation toward a real product,” Smith said, noting that he participated in the Gies College of Business Faculty Entrepreneurial Leadership Program last semester. “I’m excited about the possibility of entrepreneurship in addition to the new research directions that this could nucleate.”
About XPRIZE
XPRIZE is the recognized global leader in designing and executing large-scale competitions to solve humanity's greatest challenges. For over 30 years, our unique model has democratized crowd-sourced innovation and scientifically scalable solutions that accelerate a more equitable and abundant future. Donate, learn more, and co-architect a world of abundance with us at xprize.org.