Large-Scale Decentralized Solar Desalination: A Blueprint to Make Efficient Day-Long Technologies a Reality

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dc.contributor.advisorAlabastri, Alessandro
dc.creatorSchmid, William
dc.date.accessioned2023-09-01T19:49:56Z
dc.date.created2023-08
dc.date.issued2023-08-08
dc.date.submittedAugust 2023
dc.date.updated2023-09-01T19:49:57Z
dc.descriptionEMBARGO NOTE: This item is embargoed until 2024-08-01
dc.description.abstractAmong potential solutions to global water scarcity, thermal desalination is a flexible choice for water treatment, given its key advantages in robustness and limited salinity dependence. Light can power thermal desalination by dissipating electromagnetic energy into heat. Solar-driven photothermal desalination (SDPD) can lead to decentralized water purification, improving accessibility and reducing the environmental impact over conventional, heavy infrastructure-based desalination practices like reverse osmosis. Unfortunately, today’s best decentralizable SDPD technologies barely surpass 10% of the thermodynamic limit for thermal desalination. Furthermore, there is limited consensus on how to best evaluate and compare the efficiency of diverse solar-driven systems, particularly with respect to their day-long performance under natural, time-varying intensity. Recently, we proposed a generalized approach for achieving efficient, scalable, and day-long SDPD. Instead of optimizing individual components like solar absorbers and evaporators, our approach emphasizes the critical transfers of power underpinning the entire thermal desalination process. In particular, the minimization of environmental losses and maximization of heat recovery depend on each other, and their combination is paramount in bolstering the performance of real-world practical systems. Guided by our approach, we have determined that SDPD systems of a specific size and input salinity operate most efficiently at a specific optimal input power, a previously understudied fact with major implications on the day-long operation of modular networks of individual systems. By focusing on optimizing system-wide thermal energy recovery, loss mitigation and exploiting dynamic energy recovery schemes that can be tuned adaptively for time-varying input power, highly efficient, cost-effective systems can be designed to best take advantage of available light.
dc.embargo.lift2024-08-01
dc.embargo.terms2024-08-01
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.citationSchmid, William. "Large-Scale Decentralized Solar Desalination: A Blueprint to Make Efficient Day-Long Technologies a Reality." (2023) Master's Thesis, Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/115239.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/115239
dc.language.isoeng
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.
dc.subjectdesalination
dc.subjectSDPD
dc.subjectsolar desalination
dc.subjectoptimal heat recovery
dc.subjectenergy efficiency
dc.subjectscalability
dc.titleLarge-Scale Decentralized Solar Desalination: A Blueprint to Make Efficient Day-Long Technologies a Reality
dc.typeThesis
dc.type.materialText
thesis.degree.departmentElectrical and Computer Engineering
thesis.degree.disciplineEngineering
thesis.degree.grantorRice University
thesis.degree.levelMasters
thesis.degree.nameMaster of Science
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