Among the various forms of carbon materials, activated carbon still possesses the maximum attention as an optimum commercially available, cheap, and effective electrode material for the capacitive deionization desalination process. However, the well-known hydrophobicity and low specific capacitance limit its wide application. In this study, incorporation of zirconia nanofibers with activated carbon is reported as an effective and simple strategy to overcome the abovementioned problems. Typically, zirconia nanofibers, which were synthesized by the calcination of electrospun nanofiber mats, were added to the activated carbon to fabricate novel electrodes for the capacitive deionization units. In a single-mode cell, it was observed that the addition of the proposed metal oxide nanofibers distinctly enhanced the desalination process as the electrosorption capacity and the salt removal efficiency improved from 5.42 to …