Solar-driven interfacial desalination for simultaneous freshwater and salt generation

By Jiale Xu, Zizhao Wang, Chao Chang, B. Fu, P. Tao, Chengyi Song, W. Shang, T. Deng. 2020

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Localized heating-based solar distillation has recently emerged as an efficient and facile way to generate freshwater out of saline water. Salt fouling, however, remains a fundamental challenge to stable operation of the desalination system, in particular for high-salinity brine. Here we demonstrate a solar-driven interfacial evaporation-based desalination structure, which achieves localized surface salt precipitation through mediating the horizontal salt concentration gradient within the printed paper-based solar absorber, to minimize salt fouling while maintaining heat localization. With optimized design, such desalination system achieves a stable evaporation efficiency of ~78% under 1100 W m−2 solar illumination, and simultaneously generates drinkable water out of 10 wt% brine with a solar-to-water conversion efficiency more than 40% and NaCl salts with higher productivity over conventional bulk heating-based salt farm technology. This low-cost, environmentally-friendly, bifunctional desalination technology not only helps solve the salt fouling issue but also holds the potential to offer a new way to extract minerals from seawater.

Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d47eeeff47a28a5dcd48e7f81b73e46131c51a24