Current Problems and Solutions for Solar-Driven Interfacial Distillation from a Practical Perspective

Solar-driven interfacial distillation (SDID) is becoming an effective green technology for the treatment and reuse of unconventional water sources in the past few years. However, the established design and detection of SDID systems may involve different problems regarding practical application. Herein, through a series of literature research, this work summarizes the current evaluation parameters of SDID performance and the distilled water quality, highlights the importance of evaporation and distilled water collection rate, emphasizes that volatile organic compounds would become a new pollution feature in evaporation process, and suggests that insoluble salt crystallization and microbial corrosion should be considered during the design phase to ensure the constant use of the solar evaporators.

Automated summary

Solar-driven interfacial distillation (SDID) has emerged as an effective green technology for treating and reusing unconventional water sources. However, there are various practical application issues in the design and detection of SDID systems. This work summarizes the current evaluation parameters of SDID performance and water quality, highlights the importance of evaporation and water collection rate, emphasizes the potential pollution from volatile organic compounds during the evaporation process, and suggests considering insoluble salt crystallization and microbial corrosion during the design phase for continuous use of solar evaporators.