July 28, 2019
Our collaborative review article “Pathways and challenges for efficient solar-thermal desalination” is published in Science Advances!
Using specific water productivity, i.e., the volume of water produced per area of solar irradiation per time, as the performance metric, we propose a simple and general framework to evaluate the performance of solar thermal desalination systems. The key points are:
- System design is much more important than materials as current solar absorber materials are already good enough and approach theoretical limit;
- Improving latent heat recovery is the most rewarding strategy for further enhancing solar thermal desalination performance;
- However perfected, solar thermal desalination will unlikely compete with photovoltaic-driven reverse osmosis in performance, and therefore will unlikely replace PV-RO for solar desalination at the utility-scale;
- If solar thermal desalination is limited to small-scale niche applications, the most important factor to consider in developing solar thermal desalination may be cost, not performance.
