Solar evaporation with solute replacement towards real-world applications

As a promising pathway for sustainable desalination and wastewater treatment, thermally-localized solar evaporation has been successfully demonstrated, mainly with water or NaCl solution. However, the evaporated solution can vary a lot from these ideal choices in real applications, which can easily...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Energy & environmental science 2023-11, Vol.16 (11), p.5325-5338
Main Authors: Xu, Zhenyuan, Yu, Jie, Shan, He, Wang, Jiebing, Gao, Jintong, Ye, Zhanyu, Wang, Ruzhu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Decoupling
Desalination
Distillation
Evaporation
Evaporation rate
Heat loss
Performance degradation
Salt rejection
Sodium chloride
Solar distillation
Wastewater treatment
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Summary:As a promising pathway for sustainable desalination and wastewater treatment, thermally-localized solar evaporation has been successfully demonstrated, mainly with water or NaCl solution. However, the evaporated solution can vary a lot from these ideal choices in real applications, which can easily trigger evaporation failure. Herein, we propose a solute-replacement strategy for solar evaporation, guided by a comprehensive understanding between solar evaporation and solution properties. By decoupling the heat loss and salt rejection pathways, stable evaporation of highly viscous and low-solubility solution was demonstrated, while significant performance degradation was observed with conventional design. The evaporation rate was enhanced up to 478% for the evaporation of NaAlg solution with 225 times higher viscosity than water. A high evaporation rate of 2.46 kg m −2 h −1 and a water collection rate of 2.12 kg m −2 h −1 were also demonstrated in outdoor solar evaporation and three-stage solar distillation tests of NaAlg solution, respectively. The fundamental understandings and proposed strategy regarding extreme solution properties could promote solar evaporation one-step further towards real-world applications. Solar evaporation with solute replacement enables the evaporation of a variety of source solutions towards real-world applications, via the decoupling of heat and mass transport pathways.
ISSN:1754-5692
1754-5706
DOI:10.1039/d3ee02592f