
Simultaneous
Production of Fresh Water and Electricity via Multistage Solar Photovoltaic Membrane
Distillation
Wenbin Wang1, Yusuf Shi1,
Chenlin Zhang1, Seunghyun Hong1, Le Shi1, Jian
Chang1, Renyuan Li1, Yong Jin1,2, Chisiang Ong1, Sifei Zhuo1 and Peng Wang1,2,3,*
1Water Desalination and Reuse Center, Division of
Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering, King Abdullah University
of Science and Technology, Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
2KAUST Solar Center (KSC), King Abdullah University of
Science and Technology, Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
3Lead Contact
*Correspondence: peng.wang@kaust.edu.sa
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
various clean water production processes, especially seawater desalination,
consume a lot of electricity. The ramifications of the water-energy nexus have
been greatly aggravated especially in arid and semi-arid regions. 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
and other contaminated water sources while simultaneously having uncompromised electricity
generation performance (> 11%) by the PV component under one Sun irradiation.
The design uses a commercial solar cell as photovoltaic component for electricity
generation and photothermal component for clean water production at the same
time. 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 condensation in each
distillation stage. The smart use of the solar energy results in an excellent
performance of co-generation of electricity and clean water. Compared to
setting up power plants and seawater desalination plants separately, this
composite device can significantly reduce capital investment costs by sharing the
same land and the same mounting system and thus represents a potential
possibility to transform an electricity power plant from otherwise a water
consumer to a fresh water producer.