Photothermal Particles-Based Fluidized Evaporation for Solar Seawater Desalination

Abstract

Solar-driven seawater desalination is a green, efficient, and sustainable technology for obtaining clean water. In this paper, a fluidized evaporator was constructed by introducing photothermal particles into a self-made liquid−solid fluidized bed with an inner diameter of 0.01 m and a height of 0.06 m, which combined the advantages of photothermal conversion with the fluidization technology of online fouling prevention and removal. The evaporation performance test result shows that when the size of photothermal particles increases from 0.25 to 1.42 mm under 1 kW/m 2 irradiation, the corresponding evaporation rate decreases from 1.24 to 1.15 kg•m −2 •h −1 . And the solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency decreases from 70 to 63.3%. After desalination in simulated static seawater using photothermal particles, the ion concentration of desalinated water drops by 3−4 orders of magnitude, exhibiting an excellent desalination performance. Moreover, the fluidized bed evaporator has good durability in the cyclic tests.