Highly efficient and salt rejecting solar evaporation via a wick-free confined water layer
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s41467-022-28457-8.pdf
Description
Published version
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3.03 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
cdac7bea71c52147c367ea48f3b61bfe
Author(s)
Zhang, Lenan
Li, Xiangyu
Zhong, Yang
Leroy, Arny
Xu, Zhenyuan
Zhao, Lin
Wang, Evelyn N
Date Issued
2022
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Zhang, Lenan, Li, Xiangyu, Zhong, Yang, Leroy, Arny, Xu, Zhenyuan et al. 2022. "Highly efficient and salt rejecting solar evaporation via a wick-free confined water layer." Nature Communications, 13 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Recent advances in thermally localized solar evaporation hold significant promise for vapor generation, seawater desalination, wastewater treatment, and medical sterilization. However, salt accumulation is one of the key bottlenecks for reliable adoption. Here, we demonstrate highly efficient (>80% solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency) and salt rejecting (20 weight % salinity) solar evaporation by engineering the fluidic flow in a wick-free confined water layer. With mechanistic modeling and experimental characterization of salt transport, we show that natural convection can be triggered in the confined water. More notably, there exists a regime enabling simultaneous thermal localization and salt rejection, i.e., natural convection significantly accelerates salt rejection while inducing negligible additional heat loss. Furthermore, we show the broad applicability by integrating this confined water layer with a recently developed contactless solar evaporator and report an improved efficiency. This work elucidates the fundamentals of salt transport and offers a low-cost strategy for high-performance solar evaporation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28457-8
