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Passive solar desalination towards high efficiency and salt rejection via a reverse-evaporating water layer of millimetre-scale thickness

Nature Water volume 1, pages 790–799 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Although solar-driven reverse distillation integrated with thermal localization has recently shown attractive solar-to-water conversion efficiency, effective salt rejection/discharge approaches are scarce for achieving sustainable passive solar desalination. Here we elaborately fabricated solar distillation devices based on reverse-evaporating water layers of millimetre-scale thickness and successfully realized simultaneous high efficiency and salt rejection during solar desalination processes. Two passive operation modes (gravity mode and discharge mode) were developed for sustainable salt rejection, which showed solar-to-water conversion efficiencies of 59.1% and 60.6%, respectively, with 3.5 wt% brine. More notably, the device fabricated also showed excellent capacity (47.4% efficiency) to continuously desalt high-salinity (21 wt%) water without salt crystallization. For a wide application level, we discussed and tested ten-stage desalination devices based on reverse-evaporating water layers. A total efficiency of 354% was achieved alongside the success of salt rejection in each stage, indicating a new pathway for passive solar high-efficiency and salt-rejection desalination.

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Fig. 1: Diagrams of three distillation modes.
Fig. 2: Results of water production of devices with various structural parameters.
Fig. 3: Two-dimensional schematic diagram of salt rejection/discharge.
Fig. 4: Salinity results under the condition of 3.5 wt% salinity.
Fig. 5: Water production and salinity results under various salinity conditions in the discharge mode.
Fig. 6: Experimental results of the ten-stage device.

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The data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information.

Code availability

The code used in this study is available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 51976013 and no. 52006124) and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (no. 3232031). We thank G. Wu, S. Liang, Y. Ji, D. Shi and Q. Ma for their help in measuring the optical parameters of the convection cover and the TiNOx-coated aluminium plate, and P. Ren for his help in taking optical photos of hydrophobic membranes. Z.Z. thanks S. Liang, H. Cheng and R. Jin for their help with the experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

    Ziye Zhu, Hongfei Zheng, Hui Kong, Xinglong Ma & Jianyin Xiong

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  1. Ziye Zhu
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  2. Hongfei Zheng
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  3. Hui Kong
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Contributions

H.Z. and Z.Z. conceived the idea. H.Z. and J.X. guided the research. Z.Z. and X.M. carried out the experiments. Z.Z. and H.K. performed the numerical simulation. Z.Z., J.X., X.M. and H.Z. discussed the results. Z.Z. wrote the first version of the paper. J.X., H.K. and Z.Z. revised the paper.

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Correspondence to Hui Kong, Xinglong Ma or Jianyin Xiong.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Water thanks Chengbing Wang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Notes 1–16, Figs. 1–25 and Tables 1–5.

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Zhu, Z., Zheng, H., Kong, H. et al. Passive solar desalination towards high efficiency and salt rejection via a reverse-evaporating water layer of millimetre-scale thickness. Nat Water 1, 790–799 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00125-1

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