Solar thermal desalination as a nonlinear optical process

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dc.citation.firstpage13182
dc.citation.issueNumber27
dc.citation.journalTitleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
dc.citation.lastpage13187
dc.citation.volumeNumber116
dc.contributor.authorDongare, Pratiksha D.
dc.contributor.authorAlabastri, Alessandro
dc.contributor.authorNeumann, Oara
dc.contributor.authorNordlander, Peter
dc.contributor.authorHalas, Naomi J.
dc.contributor.orgLaboratory for Nanophotonics
dc.contributor.orgNanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment
dc.date.accessioned2019-08-16T14:47:26Z
dc.date.available2019-08-16T14:47:26Z
dc.date.issued2019
dc.description.abstractThe ever-increasing global need for potable water requires practical, sustainable approaches for purifying abundant alternative sources such as seawater, high-salinity processed water, or underground reservoirs. Evaporation-based solutions are of particular interest for treating high salinity water, since conventional methods such as reverse osmosis have increasing energy requirements for higher concentrations of dissolved minerals. Demonstration of efficient water evaporation with heat localization in nanoparticle solutions under solar illumination has led to the recent rapid development of sustainable, solar-driven distillation methods. Given the amount of solar energy available per square meter at the Earth’s surface, however, it is important to utilize these incident photons as efficiently as possible to maximize clean water output. Here we show that merely focusing incident sunlight into small “hot spots” on a photothermally active desalination membrane dramatically increases––by more than 50%––the flux of distilled water. This large boost in efficiency results from the nearly exponential dependence of water vapor saturation pressure on temperature, and therefore on incident light intensity. Exploiting this inherent but previously unrecognized optical nonlinearity should enable the design of substantially higher-throughput solar thermal desalination methods. This property provides a mechanism capable of enhancing a far wider range of photothermally driven processes with supralinear intensity dependence, such as light-driven chemical reactions and separation methods.
dc.identifier.citationDongare, Pratiksha D., Alabastri, Alessandro, Neumann, Oara, et al.. "Solar thermal desalination as a nonlinear optical process." <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,</i> 116, no. 27 (2019) National Academy of Sciences: 13182-13187. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1905311116.
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1905311116
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/106253
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherNational Academy of Sciences
dc.rightsThis is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by the National Academy of Sciences.
dc.subject.keyworddesalination
dc.subject.keywordhot spots
dc.subject.keywordnonlinear
dc.subject.keywordsolar
dc.subject.keywordthermal
dc.titleSolar thermal desalination as a nonlinear optical process
dc.typeJournal article
dc.type.dcmiText
dc.type.publicationpost-print
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