Dedicated Convection Window Design for Activating Internal Self‐Generation Convection to Accumulate Vapor Diffusion

ABSTRACT

Solar‐driven interfacial evaporation technology offers a groundbreaking approach to water treatment. However, the relentless pursuit of high energy efficiency has encountered a bottleneck in vapor generation, necessitating consideration of vapor diffusion. To tackle these limitations, this work establishes a comprehensive liquid‐liquid‐vapor transport kinetics framework, which couples water transport, vapor generation, vapor diffusion, and thermal management. This system optimizes water transport while minimizing thermal losses by tailoring the pore architecture. More importantly, we design dedicated convection windows for activating internal self‐generation convection to accelerate vapor dissipation. This system delivered a superior evaporation rate of 4.93 kg m ⁻²  h ⁻¹ , exceeding the conventional designs (2.9 kg m ⁻²  h ⁻¹ ) while achieving energy efficiency of 89.6% (considering both environmental heat gain and convective heat gain). This enhancement stems from the efficient vapor generation and release process, driven by the synergistic interplay of water transport, thermal management, and convection control. Outdoor experiments demonstrate that the optimized array system achieves a water production rate of approximately 1.95 kg m ⁻²  h ⁻¹ without any detectable contamination. This illustrates that this strategy can be used for maximizing the performance of 3D evaporators.