CEE Environmental Engineering Webinar Series: Sustainability at Solar-Water Nexus

Among the big three renewables of hydropower, solar energy, and wind power, solar energy has the highest natural abundance and the lowest geographical limitation. In this presentation, two solar energy-based technologies will be presented as our recent efforts to supplement fresh water from unconventional sources and to enhance solar-energy conversion by water-based approaches.

(1)          The photovoltaic-membrane distillation (PV-MD) utilizes the waste heat of PV-panel to drive water distillation within multistage MD design. The state-of-the-art PV-MD is able to produce freshwater at a record-breaking rate and cools PV panels at the same time. The PV-MD is poised to simultaneously generate electricity and fresh water where conventional approaches are not effective.
(2)          There is plenty of water vapor constantly preserved in the earth’s atmosphere. Sorption based atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) is emerging as an attractive and clean way of producing fresh water. AWH has very recently be extended to help cool PV panel and a 19% electricity increase was demonstrated at field tests.