Lenan Zhang is a graduate research assistant working with Professor Evelyn N. Wang in Device Research Lab at MIT's department of mechanical engineering. His research focuses on the development of novel water, energy and thermal management solutions using fundamental principles of heat and mass transport and advanced metrology tools.
In this talk, discusses the development of a prototype for ultrahigh-efficiency desalination via a thermally-localized multi-stage solar still.
Talk Abstract:
Seawater desalination is a promising technology to address global scarcity of clean drinking water. Although several commercial approaches such as multistage flash and reverse osmosis exist at large-scales, they are not suited for developing regions due to the requirement of well-established infrastructure, centralized installation and significant energy consumption. Previous works using interfacial solar vapor generation in a portable floating structure enable passive desalination or distillation in various off-grid areas. However, the solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency, defined as the ratio of total vaporization enthalpy to total solar energy input, for most previous studies has been limited to below 100% as the vaporization enthalpy is lost to the ambient environment. In this work, we demonstrate a thermally-localized multistage solar still for desalination that enables ultra-high efficiency via a detailed investigation of the heat and mass transport mechanisms. We show the potential of our approach using a scalable, low-cost, ten-stage device which achieved a solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency of 385% and total production rate of 5.78 L m-2 h-1 under one-sun illumination. The prototype device also addresses practical issues related to device operability including water collection and salt-rejection. The design principles and device architecture demonstrated in this work could enable high-efficiency passive desalination technologies as well as other solar thermal applications.
Further Reading:
The modeling work:
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
The experimental prototype:
pubs.rsc.org/en/content/artic...
Link for mit news:
news.mit.edu/2020/passive-sola...
Link for some common questions raised by the community:
www.techbriefs.com/component/...
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