Solar Absorbing Membranes for Water Desalination

Principal Investigator
Faisal AlMarzooqi
Department
Chemical Engineering
Focus Area
Water & Environment
Solar Absorbing Membranes for Water Desalination

In this project, we develop a ‘Direct Solar Desalination’ device aiming to bring unmatched scientific understandings and “know-how” toward the achievement of a reliable desalination technology that offers high-efficiency, large scalable capacity, and the lowest energy consumption in addition to being powered by an abundant renewable source of energy, the sun. The work proceeds with fabrication, system testing, and demonstration, concluding with scalability and market feasibility. Till date, the solar desalination technologies that have been proposed in the market or within the global desalination research community taps on the integration of solar energy harvesting devices with desalination devices. In this project, we develop solar absorbing membranes that can act as a near black-body object and demonstrate an absorbance of 97%, while at the same time desalinating seawater through a pre-evaporation process. Such a device not only outperforms the existing ideas in its integration of solar energy absorbance and desalination in a single layer, rather additionally raises the thermodynamic energy efficiency limits via the process of coupling solar absorbance with enhanced evaporation via the natural capillary pumping process in nano-pores.

Solar Absorbing Membranes for Water Desalination