Electrodialysis is a separation technology that uses electric fields and ion-exchange membranes to separate charged components from solutions. Electrodialysis is a highly efficient technology with prominent applications in the production of drinking water from seawater and the recovery and upgrading of various bio-based resources.

The majority of physical and electrochemical phenomena are well understood and can be described by mechanistic models. The complex and intricate interplay of various phenomena that occur at the surface of the ion-exchange membranes add an incredible amount of complexity and a mechanistic description is often too difficult. The Julia ecosystem provides a unique opportunity to couple differential equation solvers with machine learning techniques such as neural networks as a hybrid approach to model these kind of systems. Automatic differentation facilitates the optimisation procedure and is interesting from an engineering point of view.