Assessment of conical reflectors for enhanced interfacial solar evaporation

Abstract

Interfacial solar evaporation has shown promise as an inexpensive method to produce potable water with limited infrastructure and to accelerate resource concentration processes. However, higher evaporation rates and more scalable evaporator designs are needed to achieve practical implementation. In this work, we assessed the integration of conical reflectors with three-dimensional evaporator materials to enhance light capture for boosted evaporation efficiency. Across varying geometric parameters, we observed multifold enhancements in the quantity of water evaporated but a decrease in the normalized evaporation rate due to the large projected area of the reflectors. Both of these phenomena correlated directly with the reflector angle and the exposed height of the evaporator, as wider and taller structures captured more light and offered greater surface area for evaporation. We explored how reflectors could be arranged in large-scale arrays for more efficient space utilization and suggest that the evaporation rate normalized to the active or projected area of a single evaporator may not be a suitable indicator of its potential performance at larger scales.