20.500.12556/RUL-163052 Ultra-high freshwater production in multistage solar membrane distillation via waste heat injection to condenser Passive solar membrane distillation (MD) is an emerging technology to alleviate water scarcity. Recently, its performance has been enhanced by multistage design, though the gains are marginal due to constrained temperature and vapor pressure gradients across the device. This makes condenser cooling enhancement a questionable choice. We argue that condenser heating could suppress the marginal effect of multistage solar MD by unlocking the moisture transport limit in all distillation stages. Here, we propose a stage temperature boosting (STB) concept that directs low-temperature heat to the condensers in the last stages, enhancing moisture transport across all stages. Through STB in the last two stages with a heat flux of 250 W m−2, a stage-averaged distillation flux of 1.13 L m−2 h−1 S−1 was demonstrated using an 8-stage MD device under one-sun illumination. This represents an 88% enhancement over the state-of-the-art 10-stage solar MD devices. More notably, our analysis indicates that 16-stage STB-MD devices driven by solar energy and waste heat can effectively compete with existing photovoltaic reverse osmosis (PV-RO) systems, potentially elevating freshwater production with low-temperature heat sources. membrane distillation solar energy photothermal properties of membrane multistage design waste heat exergy distillate enhancement membranska destilacija solarna energija fototermalne lastnosti membrane večstopenjski dizajn odpadna toplota eksergija povečanje destilata true false true Angleški jezik Slovenski jezik Članek v reviji 2024-10-01 13:54:45 2024-10-01 13:54:51 2024-10-06 03:35:53 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2024 0 0 19 str. Vol. 15, art. 7890 2024 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova Objavljeno NiDoloceno 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 536:621.311.243 2041-1723 10.1038/s41467-024-51880-y 209731587 Poredos_..._Ultra-high_freshwater_production....pdf Poredos_..._Ultra-high_freshwater_production....pdf 1 570289EF8C0744CBE30E11C933368826 c58ca48172894ce59dee9e1312fb376b610962c9ad14c9e4335e63ee1daa7d27 464f7c69-7fef-11ef-b232-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=192523 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51880-y 1 d2881842-7feb-11ef-b232-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=192521 Fakulteta za strojništvo 0 0 0