Dissertation Title: Long-Term Outdoor Implementation and Multistage Thermal Analysis of Scalable Solar Interfacial Desalination
Date: 2026/05/19 – 2026/05/19
Dissertation Title: Long-Term Outdoor Implementation and Multistage Thermal Analysis of Scalable Solar Interfacial Desalination
Speaker: Yushi Chen (陈雨诗)
Time: May 19, 8:30 a.m.-10:00 a.m., 2026 (Beijing Time)
Location: Room 200 at East Wing of Bao Yugang Library (GIFT building)
Abstract
This lecture focuses on the engineering scale-up and practical application of solar interfacial desalination for distributed freshwater supply. To address the major challenges in this field, including insufficient outdoor validation, efficiency degradation after scale-up, and the lack of application-oriented techno-economic assessment, this dissertation makes three main contributions. First, it establishes a systematic framework for medium-scale structural optimization and large-scale outdoor demonstration of solar interfacial desalination, and for the first time constructs a rooftop demonstration system with an evaporation area of approximately and a rated freshwater production of about ; it further identifies the key bottlenecks responsible for efficiency loss during scale-up. Second, to overcome these scale-up limitations, it proposes multistage interfacial desalination as a latent-heat recovery strategy, clarifies the mechanisms of multistage efficiency enhancement through comprehensive system-level efficiency analysis, and provides corresponding structural and thermal-management optimization strategies. Third, it develops a global techno-economic assessment framework for this technology by integrating physical modeling, experimental results, climate data, and cost parameters, and identifies that the economically optimal multistage configurations for different climatic regions typically involve stages. Overall, this work advances solar interfacial desalination from a laboratory-scale concept toward scalable engineering implementation, and provides theoretical and practical support for low-carbon freshwater supply in water-stressed regions.
Biography
Yushi Chen received the B.S. degree in Energy and Power Engineering from the University of Science and Technology Beijing in June 2021. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in Power Engineering and Engineering Thermophysics. Her research focuses on solar interfacial desalination. Her work has been published in international journals and conferences, including Nature Sustainability, Renewable Energy, and Desalination. She was awarded the National Scholarship and the title of Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.