The Rice STREED team—(left to right)—Alessandro Alabastri, William Schmid, and Sina Nazifi.
A Rice University research team led by Alessandro Alabastri, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing has been named a second-place winner of the 2025 RELX Environmental Challenge. The team, including graduating doctoral student, William Schmid, and visiting researcher, Sina Nazifi, received $25,000 to further the commercial development of their solar-powered, membrane-less desalination technology.
This emerging technology competition is organized by RELX, a multinational provider of information-based analytics and a signatory of the UN Global Compact to advance, sustainable, practical solutions for global issues such as water scarcity, sanitation, health, education, and human rights, as outlined in the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Desalination – the process of turning salt water into fresh water — will become increasingly important in the coming decades as climate change and population growth strain limited fresh water sources. The Rice team’s winning invention, Solar Thermal Resonant Energy Exchange Desalination (STREED), is a fully decentralized system designed for communities facing severe water shortages, especially rural, remote, or low-resource areas. STREED offers an alternative to traditional desalination methods, such as reverse osmosis, which can struggle with highly saline or contaminated water and produce large volumes of waste brine.
Many emerging solar-driven desalination solutions rely on fragile, expensive membranes and require large energy storage devices, making them difficult to deploy at small scales. STREED avoids these limitations by using a membrane-free, solar thermal process that recycles heat within the system.
“Large-scale desalination plants require significant energy and infrastructure. Resources that many communities simply don’t have,” Alabastri said. “Our goal was to create a low-cost, decentralized technology that can purify even high-salinity and contaminated water sources with little maintenance.”
Built on more than a decade of research through Rice’s NSF Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (now part of the Rice WaTER Institute), STREED uses a resonant energy-transfer method that allows heat to oscillate efficiently between heated saline water and air carrying water vapor. By tuning the system to the optimal flow rates, the device recycles thermal energy to produce fresh water day and night, leaving behind solid salt that can be repurposed.
The team presented STREED at Pollutec, Europe’s largest environmental sustainability trade show, gaining visibility and opportunities to connect with industry partners. In addition to the cash award, the team received one year of free access to ScienceDirect, RELX’s scientific research database.
“It is a great honor to be chosen as a winner of the RELX Environmental Challenge,” Schmid said. “This prize validates our team’s decade-long commitment to sustainability solutions and our dedication to develop a compact, modular, low-maintenance desalination technology that is suited for small-scale single-module humanitarian uses and for large-scale multi-module industrial applications in arid, low-resource regions.”
The STREED team aims to form a startup and recently moved to Greentown Labs, the world's largest climate tech and energy incubator, to advance the commercial development of its technology.