Micro/nanomaterials for improving solar still and solar evaporation -- A review

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in micro/nanomaterials and system designs to enhance the efficiency and performance of solar stills and solar evaporation processes, highlighting the role of machine learning in analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of material and system innovations, including machine learning insights, for improving solar desalination technologies.

Findings

Thermal design is the most significant factor for high-efficiency solar evaporation.

Micro/nanomaterials can enhance solar still productivity and efficiency.

Machine learning helps identify key parameters affecting solar evaporation.

Abstract

In last decades, solar stills, as one of the solar desalination technologies, have been well studied in terms of their productivity, efficiency and economics. Recently, to overcome the bottleneck of traditional solar still, improving solar still by optimizing the solar evaporation process based on micro/nanomaterials have been proposed as a promising strategy. In this review, the recent development for achieving high-performance of solar still and solar evaporation are discussed, including materials as well as system configurations. Meanwhile, machine learning was used to analyze the importance of different factors on solar evaporation, where thermal design was founded to be the most significant parameter that contributes in high-efficiency solar evaporation. Moreover, several important points for the further investigations of solar still and solar evaporation were also discussed, including the temperature of the air-water interface, salt rejecting and durability, the effect of solid-liquid interaction on water phase change.