Abstract
In recent years, interfacial solar steam generation has shown great potential for desalination with high solar-to-steam conversion efficiency. However, the freshwater production rate is still limited by the substantial latent heat of water evaporation and condensation efficiency. Here we designed an interfacial solar steam-driven reverse osmosis/nanofiltration device that generates high pressure that pushes water molecules through a filtration membrane to achieve separation from ions. The solar steam-driven reverse osmosis device reaches a water production rate as high as 81 kg m−2 h−1 under 12 sun illumination. Moreover, a theoretical model indicates that there still exists attractive room to further improve the freshwater output by optimizing the thermal insulation and expansion ratio of the device. This work paves a new way to design highly efficient miniaturized or decentralized drinking water devices.
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The data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article and its supporting information files. Source data are provided in this paper. Supplementary figure source data are also available on Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22188103.v1.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the micro-fabrication centre of the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures (NLSSM) for technique support. J.Z. acknowledges support from the XPLORER PRIZE. This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 51925204, 52102262, 52003116 and 92262305), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (nos. BK20220035 and BK20200340), National Key Research and Development Program of China (no. 2022YFA1404704), Program for Innovative Talents and Entrepreneur in Jiangsu Province and Jiangsu Planned Projects for Postdoctoral Research Funds (no. 2020Z018) and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Startup Fund (4017-YQR22012).
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J.Z., X.L. and X.W. conceived and planned this research. X.W., Y.S., W.Z. and S.W. did the experiments. X.W., Z.L., J.G., Z.X., N.X., J.L. and H.F. contributed to the thermal model and theoretical calculation analysis. X.W., Z.L., N.X., J.L., B.Z., X.L., R.W. and J.Z. organized the data and wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and approved the final version of the paper.
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Wang, X., Lin, Z., Gao, J. et al. Solar steam-driven membrane filtration for high flux water purification. Nat Water 1, 391–398 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00059-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00059-8
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