A research team led by Prof. Jintu Fan reported the 3D cellular solar crystallizer for stable and ultra‐efficient high‐salinity wastewater treatment. This work has been published in Advanced Science.
Development of interfacial solar brine crystallizers has great potential in waste water treatment due to their excellent energy efficiency and sustainability. We developed an artificial tree solar crystallizer (ATSC) with a multi-branched and interconnected open-cell cellular structure that can significantly increase evaporation surface, achieving an ultra-high evaporation rate (2.30 kg m−2 h−1 during two hours exposure) and high energy efficiency (128%) in concentrated real seawater. The unit cell design of ATSC promoted salt crystallization on the outer frame rather than the inner voids, ensuring that salt crystallization does not affect the continuous transport of brine through the pores inside the unit cell, thus ATSC can maintain a stable evaporation rate of 1.94 kg m-2 h-1 on average in concentrated seawater for 80 hours continuous exposure. The design concept of ATSC represents a major step forward toward Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) treatment of high-salinity brine in many industrial processes.
The full article can be viewed from http://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202305313.
