Abstract

Disclosed are cascaded resource-recovery architectures organized by a common design rule: each processing stage is sequenced so that the waste liability of the preceding stage becomes the feedstock of the following stage. Three families are disclosed in enabling detail.

(A) A geothermal-desalination-membrane-mineral stack in which geothermal heat drives power generation via an Organic Rankine Cycle, waste heat drives or preheats desalination, and desalination brine -- already filtered and cooled by the desalination pretreatment train -- supplies a pressure-retarded osmosis salinity-gradient power stage. Geothermal brine separately supplies mineral recovery including direct lithium extraction, silica, zinc, manganese, barium and strontium sulfate. The membrane stage is deliberately isolated from raw geothermal brine by stage ordering and stream segregation. A standalone embodiment pairing salinity-gradient membranes with existing desalination brine, using seawater as the dilute feed and requiring no river, is disclosed independently.

(B) A cryogenic energy storage cascade integrating a liquid air energy storage core with an air separation unit and a datacenter, yielding electrical storage, datacenter cooling, oxygen, nitrogen, argon, rare gas recovery of krypton, xenon, neon and helium, and district heat from a single air-liquefaction process, with a phase-change-material cold buffer sized against market-specific discharge patterns. Disclosed findings include that unit staggering is a step function that floors at the market price window rather than a linear reduction, and that scarcity-priced markets require the architecture to be supplemental to conventional cooling rather than a replacement.

(C) A parallel-topology hybrid storage arrangement in which a continuous low-density generation source feeds bulk hours-scale storage and fast seconds-scale storage on separate parallel branches rather than in series.

Also disclosed as teaching-away prior art are quantified negative results: direct coupling of a salinity-gradient membrane to raw geothermal brine, and insertion of a magnetohydrodynamic stage into a membrane generation chain.

This disclosure is published expressly to establish prior art. No patent application has been filed on any subject matter disclosed here and none will be filed. Any party may study, build, operate, modify, or commercialize any part of it without permission, license, or fee. Supporting research record archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21938808

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