Wu Xuan, Wu Zhiqing, Wang Yida, Gao Ting, Li Qin, Xu Haolan
Future Industries Institute University of South Australia Mawson Lakes Campus Adelaide South Australia 5095 Australia.
School of Engineering and Built Environment Griffith University Nathan Queensland 4111 Australia.
Adv Sci (Weinh). 2021 Feb 8;8(7):2002501. doi: 10.1002/advs.202002501. eCollection 2021 Apr.
Interfacial solar steam generation is a highly efficient and sustainable technology for clean water production and wastewater treatment. Although great progress has been achieved in improving evaporation rate and energy efficiency, it's still challenging to fully eliminate the energy loss to the surrounding environment during solar steam generation. To achieve this, a novel heatsink-like evaporator (HSE) is developed herein. During solar evaporation, the temperature on the top solar evaporation surface can be regulated by the fin structures of the HSE. For the evaporators with 5 to 7 heatsink fins, the temperature of the solar evaporation surface is decreased to be lower than the ambient temperature, which fully eliminates the radiation, convection, and conduction heat losses, leading to the absolute cold evaporation over the entire evaporator under 1.0 sun irradiation. As a result, massive energy (4.26 W), which is over 170% of the received light energy, is harvested from the environment due to the temperature deficit, significantly enhancing the energy efficiency of solar steam generation. An extremely high evaporation rate of 4.10 kg m h is realized with a 6-fin photothermal HSE, corresponding to an energy conversion efficiency far beyond the theoretical limit, assuming 100% light-to-vapor energy conversion.
界面太阳能蒸汽发生是一种用于清洁水生产和废水处理的高效且可持续的技术。尽管在提高蒸发速率和能源效率方面已经取得了巨大进展，但在太阳能蒸汽发生过程中完全消除向周围环境的能量损失仍然具有挑战性。为此，本文开发了一种新型的类似散热器的蒸发器（HSE）。在太阳能蒸发过程中，顶部太阳能蒸发表面的温度可以通过HSE的翅片结构进行调节。对于具有5至7个散热翅片的蒸发器，太阳能蒸发表面的温度降低至低于环境温度，这完全消除了辐射、对流和传导热损失，导致在1.0个太阳辐照下整个蒸发器上实现绝对冷蒸发。结果，由于温度差，从环境中收集到大量能量（4.26 W），这超过了所接收光能的170%，显著提高了太阳能蒸汽发生的能源效率。使用6翅片光热HSE实现了4.10 kg m⁻² h⁻¹的极高蒸发速率，假设光到蒸汽的能量转换为100%，其能量转换效率远远超过理论极限。
