Ma, X orcid.org/0000-0003-2728-7817, Jia, X, Yao, G et al. (1 more author) (2022) Double-Sided Suspending Evaporator with Top Water Supply for Concurrent Solar Evaporation and Salt Harvesting. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 10 (38). pp. 12843-12851. ISSN 2168-0485
Abstract
Solar evaporation of seawater is promising to mitigate the fresh water scarcity problem in a green and sustainable way. However, salt accumulation on the photothermal material prevents the system continuous operation, and the water supply driven by capillary force severely limits the scale-up of the evaporators. Here, we demonstrate a double-sided suspending evaporator with top water supply and a surface water distributor for high-efficient concurrent solar evaporation and salt harvesting for large area applications. Both sides of the evaporator can evaporate water with automatic salt harvesting from the edge concurrently. Top water supply gets away from the limitation of capillary force for a larger area application and completely cuts off the heat leak to the bulk water below for higher efficiency. The energy conversion efficiency reaches 95.7% at 1.40 kg·m–2·h–1 with deionized water under 1 sun with a remarkable low surface average temperature (28.2 °C). Based on the simulation and experiment, a novel radial arterial water distribution system is developed to efficiently distribute water on a larger evaporation surface. The water distribution system alters the water transport path in the evaporation surface, leading to salt accumulation on the surface body, where salt is unable to be harvested by gravity automatically. This problem is further resolved by cutting out the salt accumulation area (16.4%) on the surface to create a floriform evaporator, which forcedly exposes the salt at the edge for harvesting. Up to70 h continuous solar evaporation from salt water at a rate of 1.04 kg·m–2·h–1 with concurrent salt collection on this floriform evaporator is achieved. This work resolves water supply and salt accumulation problems in scaling up the solar evaporators and advances the structural design of evaporators for high-efficient large area applications.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
Keywords: | solar evaporation, salt harvesting, suspending evaporator, desalination, water distribution system |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Chemical & Process Engineering (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 08 Nov 2022 11:09 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 23:08 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Chemical Society (ACS) |
Identification Number: | 10.1021/acssuschemeng.2c03948 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:192847 |