Capillary-driven desalination in a synthetic mangrove

Wang, Yunkun; Lee, Jongho; Werber, Jay R.; Elimelech, Menachem

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax5253

Cited by 59 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 52 publications

(85 reference statements)

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“…Drinkable water shortage is becoming more and more serious with increasing population and industrial pollution, and has already caused serious threat to human and environment. [1][2][3][4][5] and efficient water evaporation (Scheme 1). Via in-situ gelation and drying of mixture of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and polydopamine (PDA) nanoparticles in a customized PDMS pattern, the 3D still is endowed with a 4 × 4 millineedle array.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aligned Millineedle Arrays for Solar Power Seawater Desalination with Site‐Specific Salt Formation

Huang

Wei

Wan

et al. 2021

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With the global environment worsening, water purification technologies for clean water collection especially from seawater or wastewater have drawn huge research enthusiasms in the past few decades. [6][7][8][9][10] Compared with traditional water purification methods, solar-driven water evaporation is considered to be a promising technology and can realize practical seawater desalination, brine purification, or polluted water remediation. [11][12][13][14][15][16] In a typical solar evaporation, high efficiency solar-thermal conversion, good heat confinement, and salt blockage is three major requirements for achieving efficient solar water evaporation. [17][18][19] Although many efforts have been devoted onto development of solar evaporators to improve the evaporation efficiency, salt from seawater would unavoidably accumulate on the interface of evaporator in the process of seawater desalination. [20][21][22][23][24][25] This resulted salt crystal will severely reduce solar absorption and also block the water supply, leading inefficient solar energy conversion and water transport. [26][27][28][29][30] Therefore, anti-salt accumulation of solar evaporation is a critical issue but remains challenging.To address the issue of salt accumulation, recent efforts have been closely paid to receive high-efficient and continuable solar still. Hu and co-works designed an anti-salt solar evaporator by vertically installing large-caliber channel array into the evaporator, and by which the high-concentration salt water on the evaporation interface could availably transport into the nearby channel via osmotic pressure mechanism. [31][32][33][34] On the other hand, "Janus" solar stills with a upper hydrophobic layer and lower hydrophilic layer have also been developed to confine salt crystallization in hydrophilic layer and then dissolute the salt crystal along the water pumping. [35][36][37] Many other strategies, such as self-clean nanoarchitecture, ion-pumping layer, and vertically aligned vessel, have been well developed for resolving salt blockage issue. [38][39][40][41][42] Although all these methods do control salt formation for some extents, water evaporation efficiency is often compromised. [43] Notably, recent reports found that salt crystallization on the edge of evaporator could effectively refrain the salt interference and maintain the efficiency of water evaporation. [44][45][46] Thus, confining salt crystallization at customized sites offers a viable approach for simultaneously realize highperformance water evaporation and precise salt harvesting.In this work, we demonstrate rational design of a millineedle array-patterned 3D solar still for site-specific salt crystallization As a sustainable and clean water production technology, solar thermal water evaporation has been extensively studied in the past few years. One challenge is that upon operation, salt would form on surface of the solar absorbers leading to inefficient water supply and light absorption and thus much reduced water vaporization rate. To address t...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aligned Millineedle Arrays for Solar Power Seawater Desalination with Site‐Specific Salt Formation

Huang

Wei

Wan

et al. 2021

Small

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“…Inspired from water transpiration in plants, [1,2] capillary-fed evaporators are widely used for many industrial applications such as water filtration, [3,4] electronics cooling, [5][6][7] heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, [8][9][10] fuel cells, [11,12] and biomedical applications. [13] Due to its essential role in the earlier processes, passive capillary pumping, which effectively transports liquid through a wick without any need for external forces, has attracted broad interest.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhanced Liquid Propagation and Wicking Along Nanostructured Porous Surfaces

Alhosani

Alketbi

et al. 2021

Adv Eng Mater

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The crucial role of capillary pumping has motivated recent innovations in porous wicking materials for many energy and environment applications. Herein, the wick‐based liquid propagation along with a porous surface, including both macroscopic water transport behavior and microscopic wicking dynamics, with a group of nanostructured porous surfaces, is investigated. These hybrid wicking surfaces are fabricated in a scalable way by bonding copper micromeshes on flat surfaces and chemical etching. These nanostructured porous surfaces exhibit outstanding wickability by simultaneously improving surface hydrophilicity and minimizing viscous dissipation of water flow. Notably, the as‐fabricated surfaces also have good thermal conductivity and high solar absorptance, which are desired properties for various solar thermal applications. To directly observe water propagation processes, infrared thermal imaging in locating the propagation front and evaluating water film thickness along the propagation direction is also demonstrated. The dynamic water vapor meniscus in a representative pore unit is captured and characterized through environmental scanning electron microscopy. A capillary pressure model and permeability model to predict the liquid propagation and wicking characteristics is then developed, resulting in good agreement with experimental results for a large variety of nanostructured porous surfaces.

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“…30 The common mangrove tree (Rhizophora mangle) can grow in saltwater by employing an ingenious combination of thermal and membrane-based desalination techniques that bypass the inherent constraints of either technique used in isolation. [31][32][33][34][35][36] Solar thermal evaporation occurs at the water-saturated nanoporous leaf tissue, which produces an absolute negative water pressure that is exploited to achieve reverse osmosis at the saltexcluding roots. 32,34 This negative water pressure is thermodynamically metastable, as described by the cohesion-tension theory, enabling a hydraulic load (DP E 30-60 atm) greater than the osmotic pressure of saltwater (DP E 25 atm).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…[31][32][33][34][35][36] Solar thermal evaporation occurs at the water-saturated nanoporous leaf tissue, which produces an absolute negative water pressure that is exploited to achieve reverse osmosis at the saltexcluding roots. 32,34 This negative water pressure is thermodynamically metastable, as described by the cohesion-tension theory, enabling a hydraulic load (DP E 30-60 atm) greater than the osmotic pressure of saltwater (DP E 25 atm). 32,33 The advantage of this hybrid approach is that the solar evaporation spontaneously drives the reverse osmosis without the active input of pressure or electric potential, such that the entire process is renewable.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%