articleNature CommunicationsJul 9, 2019GOLD OA

Simultaneous production of fresh water and electricity via multistage solar photovoltaic membrane distillation

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

PubMed
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Abstract

Abstract The energy shortage and clean water scarcity are two key challenges for global sustainable development. Near half of the total global water withdrawals is consumed by power generation plants while water desalination consumes lots of electricity. Here, we demonstrate a photovoltaics-membrane distillation (PV-MD) device that can stably produce clean water (>1.64 kg·m −2 ·h −1 ) from seawater while simultaneously having uncompromised electricity generation performance (>11%) under one Sun irradiation. Its high clean water production rate is realized by constructing multi stage membrane distillation (MSMD) device at the backside of the solar cell to recycle the latent heat of water vapor…

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